


True Nature's Child

by SylvanWitch



Series: Biker 'Verse [8]
Category: Sons of Anarchy, Supernatural
Genre: Apocalyptic crossover of doom, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:07:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As God-appointed King of the World, Jax assumes he and Dean have finally got it all under control.  You know what they say about people who assume...</p>
            </blockquote>





	True Nature's Child

_In the stars we are made whole again._

_Above the earth we are free._

_All of the world below us to watch over,_

_Our eyes shining in the night sky,_

_Our souls shining in the heavens._

_Chant of the Hero_

_Hopi_

 

 

Jax is in his office staring at a stack of agricultural reports that Grady had delivered ten days ago and reminded him about yesterday.

 

It’s not that Jax didn’t know they were sitting on his desk.  It’s that Jax avoids his office whenever possible.  Unfortunately, even the King of the World has to do paperwork.

 

It’s quiet in the Clubhouse.  J.C. had finished wiping down the bar from their impromptu brunch buffet and called out that she was heading over to the Hostel for a volunteers’ meeting. 

 

Bobby and Piney had staggered in halfway through breakfast, wolfed down two heart-attack plates, and left again, off on some errand Jax would rather not know about.

 

The rest of the crew was scattered, some of them working in the bays, some of them out on business in the town.

 

So it was a good place and time to get work done.

 

It had been pointed out to Jax that people were intimidated to run a gauntlet of bikers in order to see him.  Ope had suggested he might move his office to one of the public buildings downtown.  Jax had refused, reminding his VP that part of Jax’s perceived power came from having the Sons at his back. 

 

“Also keeps people away,” Ope had added knowingly.  A shit-eating grin had been Jax’s only answer.

 

Now, though, Jax is wishing someone would interrupt him.  He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about nitrogen levels in the soil or the proper distribution of organic fertilizers in the vineyard.  He trusts Grady to manage the many agricultural concerns in Charming, and the ex-hunter does a damned fine job.  Still, Jax is the leader of Charming, and as such, he’s supposed to put his stamp of approval on the hard work his people do.

  
“Builds morale,” Ope would say, if he were there instead of God knows where.  

 

Jax hopes God knows because he sure as hell doesn’t.  The Expedition is three weeks late for checking in and hadn’t made it to Montrose, Los Alamos, Flagstaff, or Fallon as far as anyone knew.

 

Peri had been calling all four check-in points every day for three weeks, and the report had always been the same:  No sign of the Expedition.  No indication of trouble, either.

 

He didn’t know what to think except that something must’ve gotten seriously fucked up.

 

“Fuck,” Jax mutters, trying to return his attention to Grady’s report.  He’s halfway through an analysis of how pig shit is contaminating local ground water supplies when the claxons on the Gate break his focus.

He’d be relieved if it didn’t make him feel guilty—the Gate alarms never announce good news.

 

Maybe it’s the “Spidey sense” Dean’s taken to kidding him about, that God-gifted empathy Jax finds is growing stronger each time he has to use it.

 

Maybe it’s just a feeling he’s had for weeks that the Expedition’s unscheduled silence can bring no good.

  
Whatever, when he skids to an unsteady stop at the Junker Bunker and vaults from his bike, Jax isn’t surprised to hear Marcy on the western gun-tower say, “It’s the Expedition!”

 

He joins Hale, Blue, and Feenie on the far side of the Bunker to squint at the line of vehicles.  Even from a distance of a half-mile, Jax can see that they’re missing one of the SUVs and that the gunboat in the lead looks like it’s gone three losing rounds with a freight train. 

 

They stop short of the road that approaches the Gate. They can’t bring the vehicles in the north way—the gunboats are too wide to negotiate the minefield and none of the convoy could make it through the maze of stacked cars that guards the northern entrance to Charming.

 

He’ll send Blue’s boys or some of the crew out later to ferry the vehicles around to the southern side of the city.  That’s not his main concern at the moment.

 

The convoy is obscured in a cloud of its own making as they make an urgent stop just shy of the first of the mines.  The engines stutter into silence, and Jax holds his breath.  He can hear the hot metal ticking as it cools.

 

Then movement, slowly defining itself into the figure of Sack staggering toward them, half-carrying, half-dragging Opie, whose head is lolling on his shoulder, tacky black blood sticking in his beard.

 

Jax rushes out and takes some of the burden off of Sack.  He doesn’t bother with questions; now’s not the time.  He spares a glance over his shoulder to see Chibs coming up behind them, Grace over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

 

“Call St. Thomas, let ‘em know we’ve got wounded coming in.  And get Dean there,” he calls to Blue, who affirms the order with a hand signal and takes off for the Charming side of the Bunker at a lope.  

  
“Blue’s truck is just beyond the Bunker,” he says to Sack, who seems content to let Jax take most of Ope’s weight.

 

Blue’s got the truck already running when Jax arrives, and Feenie’s in the bed helping them situate the wounded.  Jax waits impatiently, frustrated by the slow straggle of survivors, by Ope’s shocking paleness, by Sack’s uncharacteristic quiet.  The kid stands beside him looking like he’s seeing something Jax cannot, and a chill passes through him that he viciously suppresses.

 

The rest of the crew appears in ones and twos, some talking softly to each other, most wearing a thousand yard stare.  Beef and Eben, Jasper right behind them.  Tammy Rae by herself, filthy face streaked with sweat or tears.  Sample limping a little.  Edsel shaking his head and talking to himself.

 

Jax knows not to look for Stacey—that message had gotten through before the Expedition had gone AWOL.

 

Wood is missing, he thinks, and…

 

“Juice,” Jax says, relief and concern in his voice when he sees the kid sleep-walk into sight.

 

Juice brings his face up slowly, like he’s not sure he’s really heard his name called, and scans glassy eyes over Jax’s worried face.  Jax helps him up into the front seat and closes the door, slapping it and saying, “I’ll be right behind you,” already jogging toward his bike before Blue takes the truck out of park. 

 

*****

 

_“No,” said the boy, who held his last arrow nocked for deadly flight.  “You cannot pass this way.  Go back where you came from, and we will leave you in peace.”_

_But the beast’s only answer was fire._

_\--The Dragon of the Mountain_

_Shoshone legend_

In the four months since the Expedition has been gone, Sam has killed the time between radio reports by working on the ’83 Delta ’88 that has been making a permanent oil stain in Dean and Jax’s driveway.  Neither of them minds, of course.  The kid’s easy to be around, quiet at the right times and prone to goofy laughter when something surprises him into it.

 

Dean won’t admit this for fear of tempting the universe, but Sam is family.

 

Fifteen and growing like a weed, he’s mostly leg now.  Half of those long legs stick out from under the rear quarter-panel, where he’s securing the last of the bolts. 

 

“How’s it look?” Sam asks, question muffled by the wrench in his mouth.

  
“Good,” Dean answers, sighting down the elegant lines of the big old car.  “Real good.”

 

“Thanks,” Sam might say, or something else—Dean’s not sure and he’s about to ask when he notices Sam’s legs are twitching.

  
“Hey,” Dean calls. “Jerk off on your own time.  We’ve still got three days of buffing before we can prime this baby.”

 

Instead of the predicted one-fingered salute, Sam makes an inarticulate noise, half moan, half something else.  Hair raising on the back of his neck, Dean squats beside Sam’s feet.  His heels are drumming against the concrete drive.

 

“Hey,” he says, alarmed now, and reaches down to pull Sam free.  Blindly, he finds the kid’s face, keeps him from bashing his head against the fender, and then Sam is stretched out in the driveway, shirt rucked up around his rib cage, eyes half-closed, whites showing, foam at the edge of his lips.

 

“Sam!” Dean cries, knowing better than to panic, to raise his voice, but unable to quell the avalanche of cold helplessness that races through him.  He touches the kid’s face, almost draws his hand back for how cold and hard the flesh feels.

 

And then the kid’s eyes pop open and he starts to speak in an unnatural voice, a deep, guttural belching of words that seem to echo in the still afternoon air.

 

_“Those who have gone down into the earth will rise again and reclaim it.  None can withstand the fury of the rightful heirs, who have finally come into their own once again.  Beware the Reclamation.  Beware the rise of the heirs.  Heed the warnings and the signs.  Look for the omens among the four-leggeds and the winged, the beasts of the water and those that crawl beneath the earth.”_

 

As if the words have drawn light from the sky, the world around them seems to darken.

 

Dean looses a series of very specific curses.  He knows from prophetic shit, and this has the stink of God-talk all over it.

  
When the stream of words stops, Sam stops shaking too.  He goes board stiff and his teeth clench, his neck arches and then his shoulders and hips, until he’s a rigid arc, only the top of his head and the rounds of his heels holding him upright.

 

As suddenly as the fit had come upon him and the words had spilled forth, he collapses, an involuntary sigh escaping him with a dribble of pink foam, and the first drops of blood start to trickle from his ears.

 

“What, you haven’t had enough of us?” Dean shouts blindly at the sky, putting shaking fingers to the kid’s neck, relief tears pricking at the corners of his eyes when he finds a rapid pulse throbbing there.

 

Mindless of his first aid training—hell, his experience as a healer—Dean scoops up the kid’s limp body and carries him to the Impala, bundling him inelegantly into the backseat and vaulting for his own before the kid’s even fully settled.

 

Five minutes later, he’s racing through the emergency doors at St. Thomas, Sam in his arms, pale and boneless, leaving a trail of blood droplets in their wake.

 

“I need some help here,” he shouts, and Tara bolts from the supply room across the hall, already pulling her stethoscope from around her neck and doing triage on the fly.

  
“Put him in here.”  She gestures to a screened off bed as she jogs past, hitting a call button to bring a nurse to the station.  She’s back a second later.  “What happened?”

 

Dean doesn’t hold anything back, includes even his theory that it was a prophecy of the Lord.  Tara doesn’t so much as blink, just keeps taking readings, shining a penlight in his eyes, palpating his abdomen, looking for unseen injuries.

 

The nurse shows up—Marla, Martha, something…Dean should know for all the time he spends here, but he can’t seem to focus, can’t see anything but the still steady dripping of blood from Sam’s ears.

 

He has a weird moment of disconnect when he’s convinced that it’s fifteen years ago and that’s his brother Sam lying there, bleeding because Dean didn’t do his job, didn’t take care of his brother.  Then Tara’s snapping her fingers in Dean’s face saying, “Dean!  Dean, you have to go to the waiting room.  Let me work.  I’ll call you when I know more, okay?”

 

Marla/Martha takes his arm and guides him down the hall and around the corner into the wide central waiting area for the ER.  Dean has a moment to think bitterly of how much of his life he’s spent in this room and rooms just like it when a reedy, quavering voice says, “Dean?”

 

And then his arms are full of damp, heaving woman, and he looks down into the tangled mess of Wendy’s brassy hair.  He comforts automatically, grateful to have something to do, someone else’s desperation to focus on.

 

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong, Wendy?  What’s happened?  Is it Chuck?”

 

And before she can do more than nod a smear of runny mascara into his tee-shirt, the penny drops and Dean suddenly gets it.

“Let me guess—convulsions, white-eyes, weird voice, Reclamation?”

 

Wendy’s nods grow frenetic and her hitched breath breaks into out-and-out sobbing. 

 

“I—I think I’ve—l-lost him this time, D-dean.  I th-think he’s g-gone.”

 

He’s just about to settle her into a chair and offer her a tissue from the ubiquitous boxes scattered around the waiting room when he hears Jax shouting from the hallway that leads to the main entrance doors.

 

“I’ll be back,” he promises, catching Wendy’s mute nod as he bolts for the front doors, sees Sack and Jax supporting a limp Opie between them, and rushes to take the weight off of the kid, who looks half-dead himself.

 

The receptionist issues a call for all available personnel as Chibs and Feenie follow, carrying Grace between them.  Juice, glassy-eyed and clearly in shock, is herded through the door by Blue, who keeps a hand at Juice’s back in case he falters.

 

Behind them, in a slow train, the rest of the surviving Expedition members straggle in, filing into seats in the reception area waiting room or leaning against the wall near the elevators.

 

Dean doesn’t ask what happened, just hustles Ope carefully toward the ER, where Tara meets them in the hallway long enough to point to a bed.

 

He’s gratified and guilty both to see that she returns to Sam’s bedside, and he spares a thought for where Chuck might be and who’s tending to him.  Then Doctor Maartens bustles in and starts examining Ope. 

 

“Did he strike his head?”

 

Jax says, “I’m not sure—let me get Sack.”

 

Dean gives the kid credit for still being upright; his face is pale between several days’ worth of scraggly beard, the layers of grime on his face broken by sweat-tracks.  He looks like he’s been to war again, his eyes focusing on things Dean can’t see, and he squelches a shiver at the familiar expression.  He’s seen it enough in his own rearview mirror to recognize it on someone else.

 

“What happened to Ope, Sack?  The doc needs to know.”

 

With a visible effort, the kid gathers himself, rubs a filthy hand over his cracked lips, and says, “I’m not sure you’re going to believe me.  Hell, I wouldn’t believe me, either.”

 

“Sack,” Jax says, note of warning in his voice.  Behind them, the doctor carries on his careful survey of Ope’s condition.

 

The kid’s shrug says _what the hell_ as clearly as if he’d voiced the words, and then, without any preamble, “It was a giant.”

 

“As in Jolly Green?” Dean asks, mystified.  He’s seen a lot of shit in his time—including an abominable snowman not so long ago—but a _giant_?

 

“As in big-toothed motherfucker with a hard-on for human flesh.”  Sack’s voice has gotten hard and brittle, like he’s close to breaking down or passing out, but he manages to give them enough for the doc to go on:  “Thing rolled Ope’s gunboat clear over—complete flip.  Ended up on its tires, but Ope was thrown around pretty bad, and it fucked up Reno’s fifty.  Tammy Rae winged the thing with hers, and we got the fuck out of there.  Had to leave the tanker, though—fucking thing punched a hole in it, what was left of the diesel spilling all over the road.  We lost Wood—Giant ate him.  He fucking _ate_ him, Jax.”

 

From Ope’s bedside, the doc says, “I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to step outside.  Tell Sarah at the station that I’ll need her right now.”

 

They file out, Dean walking ahead to deliver the message, and by the time he turns around, Jax and the kid have disappeared.  He figures Jax is making sure Sack gets some help, and Dean wonders if the hospital is going to have enough hands before the night is through.  He heads back to the ER waiting room to see how Wendy’s doing. 

 

“Anything?” 

 

She shakes her head mutely, eyes a misery of anxiety and anguish.  
  
“Hey, you know, Chuck’s been through a lot of heavy shit in his time.  Don’t count him out, okay?”

 

Wendy nods brokenly.  “I know, Dean.  But you didn’t see him…this time was different.  There was something…”  She waves the tissue clutched in her hand around, searching for words.

 

“Alien?” Dean supplies, and Wendy’s nods grow frantic.  Tears start down her cheeks again, and Dean puts an arm around her to draw her in.

  
“Let’s wait to see what the doc says and then I’ll see if I can help. Deal?”

 

Another nod, accompanied by a hiccupping sniffle.

 

She subsides into a wet-eyed silence beside him, and Dean takes the time to prioritize who he should see first for healing.

 

He’s just figured out that he needs more info from Tara first when Jax comes in and slumps into the chair beside him.

 

“What’s happening?” Jax asks, eyes tracking to Wendy, who barely acknowledges Jax’s arrival.

  
Dean fills him in briefly, skipping the more graphic details for the sake of the woman beside him, whose steady trembling tells him she’s about reached the end of her endurance.  He knows she’s survived a lot in her life, dragged herself up from the absolute bottom, but despite the trouble she and Chuck sometimes had, Wendy’s love for the ex-prophet is obvious to anyone with eyes, and she’s just as obviously decided on the worst here.

 

When Dean gets to Sam’s condition, Jax puts his hand on Dean’s knee and squeezes, not hard, just a steady and steadying pressure that Dean appreciates. 

 

“He’s a strong kid,” Jax observes, and Dean does his own nodding, trying to clear something out of his throat so he can ask Jax what happened to the Expedition.

Jax’s answer isn’t particularly detailed, and they share a few minutes of useless speculation before Tara interrupts them, appearing in the hallway and beckoning Dean and Jax with a tilt of her head.

 

She draws them down the hall to Sam’s bed, where the kid is stretched out, pale and still unconscious but breathing evenly, eyelids fluttering like he’s busy in a dream.

 

“We’ve already had him down for an X-ray, CAT scan, and MRI, and nothing I can see indicates any kind of permanent damage.  The bleeding from the ears is a result of ruptured vessels, but the damage is minor and negligible given his age.  Barring complications, he should make a full recovery.  But…”

 

Dean, who’d let his pent breath out at her prognosis, feels sharp alarm arc through him at her codicil.

  
“This kind of damage is cumulative. His brain is resilient, but repeated stresses will lead to more permanent damage, or worse.”

 

For a moment, her grave eyes rest on Dean, almost as if she’s suggesting that he can do something about God’s quirky sense of humor in picking on a fifteen-year-old kid.  Then she relents, expression softening, and she crosses the space between them to give Jax a quick hug and to brush her lips across Dean’s cheek.

  
“He’s going to be out of it for awhile, but you can stay with him if you’d like.”  She makes a mark on a clipboard, attaches it to its hook at the end of the kid’s bed, and walks out to wait in the hallway beyond the open curtain.

 

To Jax, Dean says, “You need me?”

 

“If I do, I’ll let you know.  Stay here with the kid.  Tell him I said, ‘Knock it off,’ when he wakes up, okay?”

 

Tara is waiting, but that doesn’t stop Dean from touching Jax’s wrist, the gesture enough to bring his husband into his space, bring Jax’s mouth, warm and open, to Dean’s own.  The kiss lasts long enough for Dean to feel Jax’s heartbeat against his lips match the one under the fingers he still has wrapped around Jax’s wrist. Then Jax pulls away, offering a wholly inappropriate smirk before sidling over to Tara and following her out of sight, presumably to check on Ope or one of the others.

 

It feels like an eternity of listening to the kid’s soft breaths, but it’s probably only an hour, two at most, when Sam stirs, opens his eyes, and offers a rusty, “Hey.”

 

Drawn from dark thoughts, Dean is startled into surging out of his seat and reaching for his gun, which earns him a weak laugh from the kid.

  
It’s the best sound Dean’s heard in years.

 

“Hey yourself,” he answers lamely, knowing he’s got a stupid smile plastered across his face and not even caring that Sam’s going to use it against him for the next decade of his life.

 

“What happened?”

 

“You don’t remember anything?”

 

Sam shrugs.  “I heard you say something about jerking off, and the next thing I remember is you and that stupid grin.  Don’t tell me I actually went blind from it.”

 

Dean’s bark of laughter is too loud, relief and joy and fear all mixed up in it, but Sam seems to understand that something big has happened, because he doesn’t join in, just says, “I’m okay you know.”

 

Dean sits down, nodding like a broken puppet, and says, “Yeah,” on a shaky exhalation.  Then he scrubs a hand over his mouth and proceeds to tell Sam everything he can remember about the kid’s fit, the prophecy, all of it, right down to the blood dripping from his ears. 

 

Sam’s a tough kid, has been since Dean met him, when he was holding his own with three much bigger attackers.  And they’ve been through a lot together.  They’ve watched the world end, lost their brothers.  Found each other.

 

So Dean isn’t surprised when Sam takes it all in for a minute and then says, “Well, fuck, if God wanted to leave us a message, why didn’t he just call like everyone else instead of fucking up my reception like a douchebag?”

 

No, Dean’s not surprised—not by the language, not by the kid’s attitude, which isn’t bravado but the real thing, courage and strength and resilience.  Not surprised, but proud as hell.

 

He puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder, tries to school his expression to let only a little of what he’s feeling show through.  No sense getting all sentimental on the kid.  For one thing, he’d never hear the end of it.

 

“Jesus, am I dying?” Sam asks, and that’s the other reason Dean figures he should keep it cool.

 

Dean snorts.  “Fat chance.  We both know you’re going to live to be a ripe old pain in my ass.”

 

“That’s my job,” Jax says from the hallway beyond the curtained-off bed. 

 

Sam’s face lights up like it hasn’t in a long time, the hero-worship having worn off about the same time he caught Jax and Dean sucking face in the garage, and then he seems to remember that he’s fifteen and fucking awesome because his face slides back into the usual sardonic smirk he puts on like Dean his leather jacket or Jax his cut.

 

“How you doing?” Jax asks, and Sam says, “I’m hungry, and I want to go home.”

 

Jax smiles, tired but genuine.  “I don’t think Tara’s going to let you go tonight, but I’ll see if I can scare up some of Bobby’s chili.”

 

“Alright!”

 

“Meantime, I’ve gotta borrow Dean for awhile.”

 

Sam gives an exaggerated eye-roll.  “Here?” he says, “You can’t wait until you get home?”  
  


“Shut up,” Dean answers, cuffing Sam—gently—on the side of the head.  “Get some rest.  We’ll be back.”

 

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam answers, “Get out of here.”

Jax sketches a wave at the kid and leads Dean down the hall to one of two private exam rooms, where Chuck is stretched out, still as death, pale as the bleached white pillow case under his head.  Wendy is in the chair at his bedside, holding his hand, and the look she gives them when they walk in drives a cold spike through Dean’s stomach.

 

“How is he?” he asks, though he can pretty much see for himself. 

 

“No change.  Tara said the MRI showed some ruptured blood vessels and some scarring from earlier pro-prophecies.”  Wendy’s voice trembles and her eyes fill with tears.  She strokes Chuck’s hand automatically, like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.

 

“I’ll see what I can do,” Dean promises.  “I have to talk to Tara first, make sure I can’t do him any harm.”

 

Wendy bobs her head, tears spilling down her cheeks.  “Thanks,” she whispers, swallowing around a broken sound.  Jax puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes.

 

“We’ll be back,” Jax promises, leaning down to kiss her temple and whisper something into her ear.  More head bobbing, more tears, and then they’re moving down the hall again, this time toward the stairs leading to the second floor, where most of the stable patients are kept.

 

Here, they find Juice staring unseeing at the ceiling over his bed.  He’s been cleaned up and stripped out of his street clothes, and there’s an IV running clear fluid into his left arm.

 

“Hey,” Jax says.

  
“Hey, kid,” Dean echoes, giving Juice the best smile he can manage.  Juice and he have always had a connection, electric, flirtatious, and ultimately innocent.  They sling a lot of talk, but it’s all sweet bull.

 

Now, though, Juice barely responds except by a fluttering of his eyelashes and the barest suggestion of an expression on his otherwise wooden face.  The expression might be terror.

 

Dean walks to the far side of the bed and wraps his fingers around Juice’s wrist.  It’s an intimate gesture, echoing what he’d offered Jax not three hours ago in Sam’s room, but he finds that it’s also one of the best for healing.  He can feel Juice’s pulse rabbiting away under his fingers, can feel a fine tremor through the kid’s whole body.

 

Whatever has happened to Juice, it’s taken him apart down to his core, ripped him back to an atavistic place where there’s only hunter and hunted, and he’s most definitely on the menu.

 

Given that a giant ate Wood, Dean thinks he’s got a pretty good idea of what Juice is watching on a loop inside his head right now.

 

He closes his eyes and lets the world grow still, until all he can hear is the murmur of his heart, a steady background thrum to the rapid beat of Juice’s own, communicating up through Dean’s fingers and filling him with a vague uneasiness that he pushes back with a gentle but insistent promise of better things.

  
Focusing on light and warmth, laughter and love, Dean tries to give it all over to the man under his hand.  He feels Juice start to climb through the fear, feels him emerging from what had held him rapt and terrified for so long, and opens his eyes to find Juice—the real Juice—looking at him with a shy, embarrassed smile.

Dean doesn’t take his hand away for a full minute, letting Juice feel his relief, his sense that something wrong has been righted.

 

When he lets go, Juice is bright red but grinning for real, and Jax leans in for a half-hug and to lay a wet, loud kiss on the kid’s cheek.

 

“Good to see you,” Jax says.

 

Juice dips his head, still blushing, and says, “Sorry.”

 

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Jax answers offhandedly. 

 

“How’s Ope?”

 

Jax gives a one-shouldered shrug, casual, but Dean can see the tension in him, knows he’s hiding the worst of it from Juice.  “Holding his own.  They’re running some tests on him now.”

 

“Gracie?”

 

“She’s good.  Lost some blood, but they don’t think there’s any internal damage.  They’ve already got her patched up and in post-op.”

 

Dean feels like shit for not asking after Grace.  He’s always liked the way the girl knows her way around the big guns—and he means that in an entirely technical and in no way sexual sense.  He’s glad she’s going to make it.  They’ve lost enough good people.

 

“Good. That’s good,” Juice says, some of the light leaving his eyes.  Dean doesn’t think the kid will slip back into a fugue state, but just in case, he touches Juice’s wrist again, and when Juice meets his eyes, Dean holds the gaze.

 

He’s happy to see Juice in there, tired and sad but okay.  They leave the kid a few minutes later, and Dean feels confident in answering Jax’s worried, “He going to be okay?” with a firm, “Yeah, he will.”

 

Dean follows Jax again, this time back down the stairs and into the reception area, where the crew waits with the remaining Expedition members, most of whom seem more or less uninjured.  Chibs has a bandage on his left hand and he’s wearing a sling on that arm.  He’s got a scrape down the whole of his left cheek, shiny with antibiotic cream, and Dean can see skin through a tear in the knees of his jeans, but those cuts, too, have been tended.

 

Jax catches Chibs’ eye and jerks his head toward the entranceway.  A moment later, the three of them are outside.  Dean is surprised to see that the sun is still up, the sky a brilliant, unclouded blue.  He feels like it should be midnight and overcast.

 

After they embrace and Jax says, “Glad you’re okay, brother,” into Chibs’ neck, after Dean has likewise embraced Chibs and welcomed him back, Jax gets to the point.

 

“I heard about the giant from Juice.  He said it was huge and hungry, ate Wood and threw Ope’s gunboat around like it was nothing, and put a hole in the tanker.  That about right?”

 

“Aye,” Chibs confirms, eyes going a little hazy with remembering.

 

“You feel up to telling me what the fuck else happened out there?  Juice looks like he came through a war-zone and Sack is having flashbacks to Iraq.”

 

Dean makes a mental note to check on Sack when they’re done here.  He hasn’t seen Sack since he’d taken Opie from him.

 

“You want the short form?”

 

Jax nods.  “Yeah, just so I have a clue.  We’ll get into the heavy shit tomorrow.  Just give me the highlights.”

 

Chibs snorts at Jax’s word choice but doesn’t pause to gather his thoughts.  It’s obvious he’s been putting together a report while he was waiting for word on the fate of his friends.

 

The short form is alarming enough:  Dragons in Idaho—“which explains the gunboat—they spew napalm, or some shit.”  Chibs indicates a spume of fire with a gesture. 

 

“Some sort of really fucked up time-warp” right outside of Salina (their last check-in) and “these shapechanging motherfuckers in New Mexico.  We barely got out of there alive, decided to head to Flagstaff, only to run into flying bitch women from hell.  They were fuckin’ hideous.  They took out my Escalade like it was nothing; that’s how Gracie got hurt.  I’ve seen some weird shit, but this was a whole other level of fucked up.”

 

“We figured to skip Fallon and just come home at that point.  Gracie was out of it, and we’d lost our Escalade.  Dragons had fucked up Ope’s gunboat, but Sack kept it running.  Then we ran into crows—so many fucking crows, Jax.  More than we’d ever seen before, including Orgeon, where we thought we’d seen the worst of them.  We couldn’t get through ‘em, so we had to change plans, find another way into Cali.  That’s when we saw the giant.  You know what happened next.”

 

Jax offers an absent nod, already lost in figuring out what all of this means.  Dean can see Jax working it through, calculating angles and considering his next moves.  He claps a hand to Chibs’ good shoulder and offers, “Can I take you home?”

 

Predictably, Chibs shakes his head.  “Nah, I’ll stay here, see to Ope, Gracie, and the rest.”

 

“Sure,” Dean says.  “I’m going to head back inside, check on Sack and Opie.  You need anything?”  The question is directed at both of them, but Chibs just smiles, shakes his head, and leaves Dean and Jax alone.

 

“Fuck,” Jax says, but there’s no heat in it, just the world-weary exhaustion of someone who’s already survived too many ends.

 

“Same shit, different day,” Dean agrees mildly. 

 

Taking a deep breath, Jax puts his game face on again and Dean once more follows him back into the hospital, Jax to work his way through the crowd in the reception area, offering encouraging words and early thanks, Dean to see what he can do for Opie and Sack.

 

 _Just another day in the post-apocalypse neighborhood_ , Dean thinks as he takes the well-worn path toward the stairs to the second floor. He tells himself he feels about as confident and collected as his words to Jax might’ve suggested if Jax didn’t know him better than he does.

 

Unfortunately, Dean knows himself pretty well, too, and his self isn’t buying the bullshit.

 

*****

 

_With the speed of the demons chasing them,_

_They run down their prey in the nighttime._

_With the strength of their sins twisted up inside of them,_

_They feed on the fear of their people._

_Under the new moon, when the land is dark,_

_The shadows come alive and hunt._

—Ute Night Song

 

Jax is in the mostly deserted clubhouse, sitting at a table in the rec area, drinking beer and trying to figure shit out.  J.C. has gone outside to put something on the grill and to give him privacy.  The crew wanders in and out, some having just come from the hospital, others just in from whatever job they have. 

 

It’s around dinnertime, and most of the Sons give Jax room, waving hello, grabbing a beer, heading back outside to the tables there for dinner.  Bobby Elvis is cooking, so they know it’ll be good.

  
Tonight should be a big fucking party in honor of the returned heroes of the Expedition.  Instead, their leader is still unconscious, three others still under observation, two are dead, and no one’s in the mood for celebrating.

 

Jax spent the morning and most of the afternoon taking statements from the Expedition members up to the task of talking about what had happened.  He’s spent the last two hours trying to make some sense of it all.  He’s having no goddamned luck.

 

“Hey,” he hears, and he’s grateful for the interruption.  Jax’s head is full of questions he can’t answer and fears he can’t quite name.  Of course, he’s always grateful to see Dean.  This time, though, the second look he takes isn’t motivated by lust.

 

 There are pain-lines around Dean’s eyes and a telling whiteness at the edges of his lips.

  
“Jesus,” Jax says, pushing up out of his chair and putting a supporting arm around Dean.  It’s a measure of Dean’s exhaustion that he lets himself be led to a chair and eased gently into it.  “You look like shit.”

 

“Good.  Wouldn’t want to be accused of false advertising.”

 

Dean had spent most of the night before and all of today at the hospital, trying to speed Ope’s healing, help Sack out, and bring a greater measure of calm to Juice, whose night had been plagued with thrashing nightmares, according to the attending nurse.  He’d taken a break only long enough to run Sam over to the Home, where Sally had promised to keep an eye on him for a day or two before letting him return to the Hostel, where he lives when he’s not at Dean and Jax’s place.

 

Jax had gotten updates from Dean throughout the morning, via the landline, and each time, Dean had sounded further and further away.  Now, he can see why.  Ordinarily, Jax would make a crack about Dean thinking he’s Superman, but there’s something fragile in Dean’s expression; the skin under his eyes looks thin, and his hands are shaking.

 

Instead he says only, “Rough session?”

 

Dean nods wearily and drops his head onto his crossed arms, groaning in mingled relief and pain when Jax starts to knead the nape of his neck and then slides him out of his jacket so that he can work at the tight knots of muscle in his bunched shoulders. 

 

Under his knowing hands, Dean’s tension slowly melts away, until he’s making an almost silent, breathy sound in rhythm with Jax’s movements.  Jax deliberately sways the few inches towards Dean, letting him feel the heat of his body and the reaction Dean’s trust and need brings out in him.

 

“Man, I wish I had the energy,” Dean says, sounding desperately earnest.

 

Jax squeezes Dean’s neck teasingly and lets his fingers trail away as he moves back to his place across the table.

 

He slides his mostly full beer across to Dean, who tips it back and drains it in two long swallows.

  
Jax has to look away from Dean’s lips around the bottle neck and the long line of his bobbing throat.  It’s been a few days, and he realizes suddenly that he somehow misses Dean more with him right across the table than he does when they’re busy and apart.

 

He wants to take Dean back to the room they keep in the clubhouse and fuck him senseless.

 

Instead, he lets out a warning breath and says, “So you think this Reclamation thing is real?”

 

“Gotta be something to it if both the resident prophets were spouting the same mystic shit at the same exact time.”

 

“Got any idea what it’s about?”

 

“I might,” Dean says.

 

“It’s not another Messenger, is it?”  Jax doesn’t have to explain the worry in his voice.  The last man who carried the Voice of God got gutted by it in the end.  Not something either of them is likely to forget.

 

While Jax would feel sorry for the loss of Chuck, Sam’s death would gut him—and he can’t even think about what it would do to Dean.  He knows it’s his job to consider contingencies, but he’d refused up to that point, and Dean’s next words bring a rush of relief he feels all the way from his throat to his belly.

 

“No.  At least, not for our God.”

 

“’Our’ God?”

 

“Yeah, you know, lightning from the sky, ashes to ashes with extreme prejudice?”

 

“You make it sound like there’s another god.”

 

“Well, yeah.”

 

Jax isn’t sure whether he’s more stunned by the casual way Dean says it—like he’s always known there were many gods—or by the fact of what he’s saying.  He settles on listening while Dean gives him a basic lesson on world religions and the deities he has known. 

When Dean’s finished, Jax takes some time to think it all over.  It’s not that he’s never considered the possibility that there are other ways of looking at the world—you don’t spend time in Stockton without learning that the hard way.  It’s just that he’s always thought that the End was pretty definitive.  The Devil rose, there was a great battle, most of the world got wiped away.  He’s to be forgiven for making assumptions.

 

Of course, he’s been painfully reminded now about what happens to those who assume.

 

“So you think it’s some sort of Indian thing?” he asks at last, fastening on Dean’s final speculation.

 

Dean’s shrug is supremely noncommittal.  “Not sure.  But there’s someone I can ask…”

 

Which is how Jax finds himself agreeing to sending a two-car convoy to Arizona. 

 

Dean had put up a good, if somewhat tiredly voiced, argument for letting him go alone, something wistful in his face when he talked about it, like it was some sort of nostalgic road trip and not the dangerous undertaking any travel these days certainly was.

 

And it isn’t that Jax doesn’t believe Dean can handle himself—Dean’s talent for resurrection is legendary (literally) at this point in the game. 

 

It’s just that if the years have made Dean a little restless, they’ve given to Jax a grounded understanding of what matters to him, what he can and cannot live without. Dean’s value to Jax is more than professional, more than personal.  If he had to put a name on it, he might call it spiritual—if someone were threatening to set fire to his balls, that is.

 

Jax knows he’s making this call with his heart and not his head.  And he’s okay with that.

 

Besides, what good is being King of the World, if Jax can’t pull rank sometimes?

 

It helps that he’s Dean’s husband, too.

 

That’s how he gets Dean to agree in the end. 

 

“Really?” Dean says, eyebrows crawling into his hairline.

 

What Jax has just promised isn’t something he’d have offered without a great deal at stake, and Dean knows it.  It says something about their relationship that this is the bargaining chip that makes the sale.

 

Dean’s smile is wicked, all teeth and tongue, and Jax has to shift in his seat to relieve the pressure of his zipper digging into his cock.  This was not the day to run out of clean underwear. 

 

“Really,” Jax answers, his smile an exact answer of Dean’s own.

 

“Do I get a little preview?”

 

Jax rolls one shoulder and smirks.  “Do we have a deal?”

 

“Two cars.  No more than six of us total.  No big guns, either.  Strictly hand-held.  Don’t want the Hopi to think we’re invading.”

There’s something behind Dean’s humor.  Jax hears it, and he can understand.  He’s met Sari only once, but she’d left a powerful impression.  This is the woman responsible for bringing them together both times—at the very beginning by her reading of the prophecy that sent Dean in search of Charming and after the End, when she’d nursed Dean back from his three-day’s death. 

  
Jax wouldn’t fuck with her even if he didn’t admire her or know how much she means to Dean, so he agrees to Dean’s specific terms immediately.

 

Once they’ve hashed out the details, Jax leaves Dean dozing at the table to talk to the crew, mixed Sons and Charming’s Army members, who are scattered at picnic tables upwind of Bobby’s barrel grill. 

  
“You and Dean hungry?” Bobby calls when he catches sight of Jax.

  
The smell of steak, peppers and onions, and Bobby’s secret marinade makes Jax’s mouth water almost painfully.  But there’s work to do before he can take the time to eat.

  
“Maybe later.  Right now, we’ve got a mission, strictly volunteer.”

 

He outlines the run to the Hopi res, not too far over the border into Arizona, about a fourteen-hour trip, assuming they don’t run into any trouble.

 

There’s that _ass_ thing again. ****

He puts Chibs on quartermaster duty to pull together two transports and supplies for the trip, and he calls for volunteers.  Feenie’s earned his spot on the convoy, and despite Jax’s protests, two of the original Expedition members, Sample and Reno, insist on going along.  Horse, who’d ended up ceding his spot on the original Expedition to Wood—who became giant chow—steps up without a word, and Jax just nods, acknowledging his choice.  That leaves them one man—or woman—down. 

 

“What the hell,” Sack offers, but Bobby interrupts. 

 

“I think it’s my turn.”

 

Bobby’s been a homebody except for simple runs since the Barstow milk run years ago, when he and Juice and Chibs were attacked by a horde of imps.  That’d been just before Dean had come on the scene, Jax is startled to realize. 

 

He’s picked up the slack in a lot of ways—notably by cooking—so Jax is surprised at him now, and it must show, because Bobby shrugs elaborately and says, “Figure it’s my turn.  Besides, I’ve heard a lot about Sari.”

 

Since Bobby is the closest the Sons have to a spiritual advisor, Jax guesses it makes some sense that the man would want to meet Dean’s Yoda.  And just because Bobby hasn’t been killing things lately doesn’t mean he’s lost the knack for it.

 

“Yeah, alright.  Good.  We’ve got a crew.  Chibs here’ll have you ready in…”  He pauses to give Chibs a questioning look.

 

“Give me until the morning, day after tomorrow.”

 

“Friday,” Jax affirms.  “That’ll do.”

 

Dean’s asleep on the table when Jax comes back in, and he doesn’t have the heart to wake him up, not even to keep a part of his bargain with Dean.

  
Jax takes a steak that Bobby had kept warm and a beer that J.C. had kept cold up to the roof, where he spends some time trying not to throw his brain against the prophecy Sam and Chuck had channeled and failing miserably.  When he comes down a couple of hours later, steak only half-eaten, beer gone, spliff smoked to the tag-end, Jax is no closer to a single fucking answer, but he feels about as strung out as Dean looks when he tracks him down in their room at the clubhouse.

 

Dean had made it as far as the bed but hadn’t removed his boots.  He’s sprawled at an awkward diagonal, one arm hanging off the far side.  He looks vulnerable, wiped out, and Jax shakes off the dim shadow of a feeling as he sits down beside his husband and nudges him gently into wakefulness, at least enough to get him to share the bed.

 

The last thing he remembers is Dean muttering, “Sam,” under his breath.

 

The next thing he knows, Dean is breathing warm and wet against his neck, still dead to the world, he himself is sporting serious wood, and there’s a soft but insistent knocking at the door.

 

“What?” he growls, and J.C.’s apologetic voice comes through, “Chibs has some questions.”

 

“Give us ten,” Jax requests, and J.C. says, “Sure.”  It shouldn’t be obvious that she’s smiling, but he knows that she is.

 

He wakes Dean slowly by running his tongue along Dean’s lower lip, ghosting kisses up his scratchy jawline, nipping at his lobe and dipping the wet tip of his tongue into Dean’s ear.

 

An indistinct noise of protest morphs into a definite moan when Jax slides a hand down the front of Dean’s jeans and cups him through the fabric.

  
“Rise and shine, princess,” Jax whispers rough and low into Dean’s ear.

 

“I’ve got the rising part,” Dean notes, sleep-gruff voice sending a bolt of desire through Jax.  “But I can’t guarantee the shining.”

 

Jax kisses him deep and sloppy, uncaring of the fug of morning breath or the fact that they’re both sporting some serious bedhead.  Dean’s beautiful even when his eyes are smudged with exhaustion, even when he stinks of stale clothes and old sweat.  By the time J.C.’s second knock comes, Jax is moving restlessly against Dean’s thigh, Dean thrusting his hips up in tiny, circular motions against the weight of Jax pinning him to the bed.

 

They’re frustrated and sweaty and unfulfilled when J.C. says, “Ope’s awake and asking for you,” which effectively kills the mood.

 

Jax grins ruefully and with real regret at Dean, who runs a hand through his hair and says, “Later,” in that dark, promising tone that makes Jax—if possible—harder still.

 

“I’ll hold you to that,” Jax warns, and Dean smiles and swipes the taste of Jax off of his lips with his own tongue. 

 

“I’ll hold me to something else,” he answers, a weak joke that nevertheless wrings a dirty laugh from Jax.

 

Yeah, they’re definitely married.

 

“Fucking giants,” are the first words out of Opie’s mouth.  Rita is at his bedside looking ten years older than when the Expedition had pulled out four months ago.  The worry of not knowing what had happened to him and the responsibility of keeping Ellie, Ope’s daughter, from despair, had taken their toll on the bright, sharp-faced woman.

 

To her credit, she gives Jax only a searching, pointed look, not the kind that might have burnt him to cinders in his tracks for sending Opie out there to get hurt.  Rita’s a good woman who knows her man well, and she doesn’t argue when Ope gives her a pointed—if pained—look of his own, just kisses him and brushes by Jax with a faint smile and an arm-squeeze for Dean, who’d helped to speed Ope’s recovery.

 

Ope gives a report similar in most particulars to the ones Jax has already heard.  From Sack to Juice and back again, the same list of monsters:  dragons, shapeshifters, time warp, harpies, sun-eclipsing clouds of crows, and, of course, a giant.

 

Jax gives Dean a look over Ope’s bed, and Dean takes the hint, only coming closer for a moment to say, “Glad to see you’re back in the land of the living.”

 

As he turns to leave the bedside, Ope surprises Jax by grabbing Dean’s wrist.  By the expression on Dean’s face, he’s surprised, too, but he bluffs it out.

 

“I know what it cost you,” Ope says.  “Thanks.”

 

Dean shrugs, obviously embarrassed and uncomfortable—he sucks at accepting gratitude gracefully, or at all—and then manages a rough, “What’re brothers for?”

 

It’s Ope’s turn to be uncomfortable at that; he’s never really warmed up to Dean, accepting him grudgingly first for his relationship with Jax and then welcoming him a little more fully for the unique skill set he brings to the Sons.  But Dean isn’t wearing a cut at least in part because Opie would never vote him in, and Dean’s words seem to highlight that disparity now.

 

They aren’t really brothers, unless it’s by marriage.

 

Still, if their mutual discomfort is obvious, so is the fact of Dean’s having sacrificed to help Opie heal.  Despite the sleep he’d gotten the night before, Dean still looks grey and worn, not at all like someone who should be getting into a convoy for a long, possibly dangerous road trip.

 

Ope lets Dean go, and Dean sketches a wave before heading out to see how Grace, Juice, and Chuck are doing.  Jax suspects he won’t see Dean again until nightfall.

 

He spends only ten more minutes with Ope before Tara comes in to shoo him out.  When he gets to Grace’s room, the woman is sitting up in bed looking fit if a little pale.  She tells Jax he just missed Dean.

Jax decides to forego a visit to Juice just then, knowing he’ll only interrupt Dean and the kid.  Part of him wants to barge in, keep Dean from overtaxing himself, protect him from his good intentions, which tend to run a little too close to the martyr end of the spectrum.

 

He knows what Dean would say to that impulse, so he squelches it with a sigh and heads back to his office at the clubhouse.

 

The rest of the day passes in a flurry of activity for Jax, who in addition to his usual duties—and those motherfucking agricultural reports, which Grady is hounding him to go over—has to run interference between Chibs, whose personal motto involves being prepared for another apocalypse, and Dean, who wants to be as low-key as possible to prevent pissing off the Hopi.

 

This involves a lot of phone tag, some truly epic and undecipherable rants on the walkie, and a monster headache by the time Dean drags in after ten.

 

“Grace gets out tomorrow,” Dean tells him, slumping into the same chair he’d occupied a couple of nights ago.  J.C. plops a beer down in front of him.  “Juice is home now, polishing his chrome.”  For a change, it’s not a euphemism.  The kid had restored a ’73 Harley HydroGlide just before the Expedition left, obviously shoring his luck against sure disaster.  It’s a good sign that he’s working on her now.

 

Bobby and Piney chime in with the usual ribald remarks about chrome-polishing, a beat too late but still expected enough to raise smiles from both of them.

 

“And Chuck?” Jax asks quietly when the older men return to talking with J.C. about her whiskey supplier.

 

“He’s in a locked room in restraints,” Dean says, something like sorrow skating across his face.  “He woke up this morning and started thrashing around, wouldn’t stop.  They had to pump him full of sedatives just to get him to quiet down.”  Dean lets out a shaking breath.  “I think Wendy might be right—we’re losing him.  I’ve never seen him this bad, not even when he shot up their house.” 

 

That incident had heretofore been the low point in the gospel according to Chuck.  That the ex-prophet has fallen further still, and after such a seemingly miraculous recovery, is hard to take even for Jax, who doesn’t have personal history with the guy.

 

Jax has never been jealous of the affection Dean has for Chuck, one of the last ties Dean has to his old life, to his brother and everything he lost, gave away, or gave up to save the world.  But right now, he regrets Dean’s feelings for the prophet because he can see it’s riding his lover hard.

 

“Wendy says he came to and started speaking in tongues; she can’t understand a word of it.  Near as I can tell, it’s some sort of Indian language.  I called Grady”—the old hunter and Jax’s agriculture manager is the other of Dean’s remaining connections to the past, a good man, weathered and wise, who doesn’t always bring comfort but often lends perspective—“He’s going to stay with Chuck, see if he can’t figure out what’s going on.  He thinks we’re onto something with the Indian thing.”

 

Anyone else wouldn’t hear the pride in Dean’s voice, the way he’s gained something from the old man’s approval.  But Jax isn’t just anyone.

 

Leaving aside his God-given empathy, Jax can read Dean inside and out, knows almost every part of him.

 

Except the part that Grady probably knows better, the part Jax had only begun to understand recently, starting with the whole “abominable snowman” incident.

 

Jax has a feeling he’s going to get to know the boogety-boogety part—as Dean himself might call it—way better than he ever wanted to.  It’s a case of be careful what you wish for, and right now, Jax is wishing he’d been smart enough to leave it all in the past.

 

Of course, the world had other plans for him.

 

To drive away Dean’s lingering sadness over Chuck’s decline—and if he’s being honest, to leave a mark on Dean that he can carry to Arizona and back, a reminder of exactly what he has waiting for him at home—Jax rises, saunters around the table, and waits there, slouched in obvious invitation, eyes hot with what he wants.  When Dean stands, Jax wipes the challenging smirk from his face by snaking a hand down his pants to brush his fingers along the crease of Dean’s pelvis.

 

Dean stiffens, takes in a harsh breath, seems on the verge of resisting in the wake of lewd noises and J.C.’s filthy laugh from the bar behind him, and then sighs against Jax’s cheek as he surrenders his dignity in favor of the solid pressure of Jax’s hand all along his cock. 

 

The whisper-thin cotton of Dean’s boxers is silky and hot under Jax’s hand, and he can already feel moisture spreading under his touch.  He wants to undo Dean right here, right now, and that’s not like him, not like them.

  
They’ve been known to use public displays of affection as a political message—say, to unbalance an opponent—or a big “Fuck you!” to bigots everywhere.  But in the relative privacy of the Clubhouse, they’re usually pretty discreet.

 

This is not.

 

“Get a room,” Piney grumps, but there’s no real anger in it. 

 

Bobby says, “Great, give them ideas.  They’ll keep us up all night.”

 

J.C. just laughs that rich, full, ringing laugh of hers, and Jax can’t help but smile against Dean’s lips.

  
“Wanna?”

 

Like he has to ask.

  
Dean steps back, breath hitching as Jax’s hand slides from inside his pants, and turns toward their room at the back of the Clubhouse.

 

Jax follows, ignoring Piney’s anatomically impossible suggestions. 

 

He winks at J.C. and mouths, “Eight o’clock,” and she giggles like a schoolgirl and winks right back.

 

He’d marry that woman if he weren’t already happily tapping the ass even now disappearing into the dim doorway up ahead.

 

 

Inside, Dean’s turned on only the little gooseneck lamp in the corner of the nightstand on Dean’s side of the bed.  He’s standing between the bed and the bathroom, arms at his side, looking lost, like he’s forgotten why he came in here.

 

It nearly kills him to offer, “If you’re too tired…,” so he’s gratified when Dean growls, “Shut up,” and shrugs out of his over shirt.

 

Underneath, he’s wearing one of Jax’s white tee-shirts, _Sons_ printed in blue block letters across the front.  He really will have to do laundry after the mission—after Dean—leaves for Arizona tomorrow.

 

As if sensing the direction of Jax’s thoughts, Dean closes the space between them, slides flat palms under Jax’s cut, and takes it carefully off of him, leaving it draped over the back of a chair near the dresser.

 

Like he’s broken a spell, Jax feels urgency rush over him, and he toes off his sneakers, reaches for his zipper, even as Dean is yanking off his own tee-shirt and bending to unlace his boots.

  
It’s a miracle they don’t knock each other unconscious like some X-rated Stooges move because neither is paying much attention to the strip-tease.  They’re too focused on getting naked, on being skin on skin, which suddenly seems like the only thing worth achieving.

 

For as many times as he’s seen Dean naked, seen him on his back, knee cocked outward to show off his goods, cock hard and bobbing, balls full, fingers fondling them, skimming back over the soft skin behind them toward the hidden hole, Jax is pretty sure he’ll never get tired of it.

 

The familiarity shouldn’t ratchet his desire up to a stinging hum under his skin, shouldn’t make him desperate to eat his way up Dean’s body, starting at the sharp jut of his ankle bone and working up the threaded scar on the inside of his calf, then around the newer surgical scar at the front of his kneecap.

 

Dean’s ragged breathing, his swallowed sounds of compliance, as close to begging as he usually comes, shouldn’t make Jax have to rest his face against the quivering flesh of Dean’s inner thigh, shouldn’t make him have to think about crop yields and manure management until he can keep from coming like a teenager before he even gets to the best part.

 

The scent of Dean at the crease of his pelvis, sweat and musk, and the sharp tang of the pearled drop at the tip of his cock against the edge of Jax’s tongue shouldn’t make Jax shudder.

 

So he’s heard.

  
But though there’s nothing new here, it’s still all fresh again, all immediate and overwhelming—love and lust and a rush of impossible gratitude that he has this, that it’s his.

 

Jax never takes it for granted when Dean is clutching his hair until it stings at his scalp, urging him with a knee against his shoulder, breaking his name between curses as Jax weighs Dean’s cock on his tongue and then hollows his cheeks and swallows.

 

As always, Dean tugs at his hair harder still to bring his head up, warning him that he’s close, and Jax surges up Dean’s body, eager to feel Dean’s wet cock catch against the skin of his own.  He wants to swallow Dean’s breath out of his mouth, feel it in his own lungs, and he can’t seem to get enough of the desperate curses Dean’s loosing in a steady stream or the way he spreads his legs further to accommodate the breadth of Jax’s hips.

They rock together, too hot to stop for lube, and as much as Jax started the day wanting to climb all the way inside Dean, he can’t hold back when Dean wraps a sure, callused hand around them both and comes in a scalding spume against their bellies.

 

Jax follows in a blinding rush, stuttering Dean’s name and words of love as he adds to the slippery mess, sliding in and out of the cradle of Dean’s palm until it’s too much, way too much, and they’re both shuddering out a mouthful of curses, half-laughing, half-sobbing.

 

 _I’ll be fine_ , Dean doesn’t say.

 

 _You’d better_ , Jax doesn’t answer.

 

They don’t talk like tomorrow’s guaranteed.  They’ve each seen too much, lost too many that mattered to ever make the mistake of pretending that the future is theirs.

  
Instead, they laugh at each other’s shaky attempts to rise and walk to the bathroom, sigh under the hot stream of the shower, and wrap soap-slick hands around soft members, skim suds down sticky bellies, tell each other in touch what they rarely say out loud.

 

Then they crawl back into bed, still damp, naked and sated, touching down the lengths of their bodies, shoulder to shoulder and facing the world even when they’re asleep.

 

Jax dreams of giants that drink gasoline and dragons that talk gibberish, and when J.C.’s definite rap at the door brings him up out of it, he’s momentarily disoriented to see Dean standing beside the bed, already dressed, just sliding his gun into the back of his pants.

 

“You’ll blow your ass off that way,” Jax says, an already-old warning that Dean answers with the expected, “Easier access.”

 

He suddenly has to fight back the urge to say, “Don’t go,” as sure as he’s ever been of anything that Dean is going to return, but bring something with him that neither of them expects and for which they’ve never prepared.

 

Jax shakes it off, chalks it up to the weirdness of the last several days, and ignores the insistent little voice in his head reminding him that God gave him intuition for a reason.

 

Instead, he gets out of their still-warm bed, shoves Dean against the door, heedless of J.C. just beyond it knocking, and sucks on Dean’s neck until Dean’s hips start an involuntary boogie and they end up jacking each other off fast and rough.

 

Dean has to change, of course, which makes them a little late for breakfast.

  
Jax doesn’t give a shit.

 

When Dean slides behind the wheel of a late model Jeep 4X4, one of three they’d gotten in trade from Austin and which Juice and Sack had armored the old-fashioned way—phone books in the door panels and plating over the grill—he’s sporting a dark purple hickey well above the neckline of his over-shirt and for which he’s already suffered a gauntlet of catcalls and comments.

 

Jax can’t help the grin he’s wearing, nor is he ashamed of the surge of possession he feels when he sees someone’s eyes take in the mark.

 

Feeling a lot better about his premonition that morning, Jax waves the two-car convoy away with a smile that Dean returns.  He watches them take the left out of the driveway, heading for the South gate, and then turns toward the clubhouse and the inevitable, seemingly eternal agricultural reports that await him there.

 

*****

 

_When he had taken the life of his mother, Hok’ee raised his bloody hands to the sky in defiance of the Sun.  Then he dropped to all fours and became a wolf, and thereafter, he could transform at will from man to wolf or any other creature that served his wicked needs.  Evil haunted the reservation then, and no one but the despairing went out after dark._

—Navajo legend, circa 1958

 

The journey has been suspiciously quiet, and Dean is growing nervous behind the wheel of the lead Jeep.  Beside him, Bobby is humming under his breath and tapping out a rhythm against the open window frame.

 

In the backseat, Feenie is bouncing his knee, a nervous habit Dean’s already called him on—twice.

 

They had crossed into Arizona and stopped in Flagstaff only long enough to deliver an order of medical supplies to Walt and pick up a couple of coded documents:  “strictly need-to-know,” Walt had explained in his monotonous way.

 

Now, they’re twenty miles east of Winslow.

 

“Been awhile since we had a break,” Bobby observes mildly, pulling Dean out of his worried reverie.

 

“Yeah, okay,” he answers shortly, signaling the second Jeep that they’re going to pull over. 

 

  1. Even with the four-wheel drive, the Jeeps have trouble in the treacherous places.



 

They all climb out, Feenie with his AK locked and loaded, eyes scanning the land around them, alert—maybe even hoping—for trouble.

 

Bobby stretches elaborately while Dean walks back to talk to Horse, who’s driving the second Jeep.

 

“Whaddya think?” he asks.

 

Horse shrugs, expression hidden behind aviator sunglasses—not that it’d make a lot of difference with the stoic man.  “Something feels off.”

 

Dean’s glad to know it’s not just him.

 

“Back on the road, then,” Dean concurs, raising his voice to a chorus of sighs and groans.  It’s been a long twelve hours.

 

Sample is just coming in from a piss when Feenie says, “What’s that?” eyes on a scraggly fringe of brush growing maybe a half-mile to the south of their current position.

 

All eyes swing that way, and there’s a tense silence of several long seconds.

 

Reno says, “What?” obviously irritated by Feenie’s apparent paranoia, but then Sample says, “Movement,” at the same time Horse says, “There,” and Dean follows the big man’s pointing finger to make out a dust cloud, like a guided mini-twister, coming right for them.  
“Back in the Jeeps, let’s go, let’s go!” Dean shouts, racing for the driver’s seat, throwing himself in and starting it up even as he’s reaching to close the door.  He has a bad feeling about what that fast-moving whirlwind represents, and he doesn’t care to stick around to confirm his suspicions.

 

There’s a bad moment when the back tires of the second Jeep spin helplessly in the drifted sand, and then they catch and it’s hauling ass up close to their bumper, both vehicles driving well past the manufacturer’s safety guidelines, hoping for cover in Winslow, fifteen miles and closing.

 

“It’s gaining!” Bobby reports, craning out the open window to keep the thing in his sights.

 

“Fucker moves!” Feenie agrees, straining to keep the muzzle of his gun as steady as possible against the wild careening of the Jeep.

 

They pass a sign telling them Winslow is seven miles ahead.  Dean has a feeling they might not make it.  And there’s no guarantee they’ll lose the thing once inside the city limits.  Plus, cities tend to offer further hazards—overturned cars blocking the way, wild dogs swarming into the streets, the infected undead—rare now, but still a threat.

 

He’s almost on it before Dean makes it out—a sign hanging half off its post, arrow pointing drunkenly at the ground, the words, “Injun Joe’s” obscured by road dust.  On instinct, he signals the left-turn with his blinker and a frantic motion of his arm thrust out the window.

  
He slows only enough to avoid flipping them and takes the turn hard, bouncing onto the sun-buckled macadam of Route 99.  The Jeep fishtails, tires spinning on drifted sand and then, after a breathless moment, catching and bucking them ahead on the rutted pavement.  Dean watches the rearview to see that Horse makes the turn, watches him close the gap between the two vehicles, and then he says, “You see it?”

 

“It’s right behind us, maybe a quarter-mile,” Bobby answers.

 

“Is it gaining?”

 

Dean doesn’t breathe while he waits for Bobby’s reply.  “No.”

 

Gritting his teeth and willing the Jeep forward, praying the road is clear and that they don’t hit any deep drifts, Dean leans over the wheel and focuses on getting them to the reservation.  It’s only a gut feeling, something left over from his upbringing or maybe a passage he’d read in his father’s journal yesterday, but Dean hopes that when they get to reservation land, they’ll be safe from the skinwalker, which is what he’s sure is on their asses now.

 

It’s unlike any skinwalker he’s ever seen, and he’s encountered four in his life that he can recall.  Those others were fast, sure, but nothing like the speed of this monster.  And those others hadn’t had its endurance, either.  Skinwalkers are evil sons-of-bitches, but they’re also pussies, giving up on prey that seems too self-sufficient, usually content to cull the weakest of the herd—the couple in the lonely old beater chugging down a dark road, the solo runner out for an ill-conceived nighttime jog.

 

He knows he shouldn’t be surprised that this creature has mutated into a bigger threat—every other fucking monster has done the same.  Hell, even your friendly neighborhood dog has morphed into Cujo practically overnight.

They’re close to the reservation—the last sign said two miles to Injun Joe’s—when the screech of brakes warns Dean that something’s wrong with the second Jeep.  He can’t tear his eyes from the road ahead—sand has drifted more aggressively here, almost like the land is trying to keep people out of the reservation—and he trusts Bobby to tell him what’s happening.

 

But it’s Feenie who shouts, “Shit!” and aims his gun out of rear driver’s side window.  “It’s right here!  Right here!”

 

A blast too close to his ear makes Dean swear and try to hold the wheel steady even as his head rings and the percussion makes him dizzy.

  
“Knock it off!” shouts Bobby, reaching behind Dean’s seat to yank on Feenie’s belt.  “You want to get us all killed!  You can’t aim for shit with us bouncing all over like this.”

 

“The thing took the sideview mirror off Horse’s Jeep!” Feenie shouts back, voice edging on defiant panic.

 

“Have you got a shot in hell of hitting it?” Bobby returns reasonably.

 

“No,” comes Feenie’s sullen reply.

  
“Then knock it off,” Bobby repeats.

 

Dean catches sight of the skinwalker one more time, just as the front tires of his Jeep cross the invisible border of the reservation.  He can tell they’ve entered into safe territory by the skinwalker’s frustrated scream, which screels up the scale and raises every hair on his body.

  
“Jesus,” Feenie prays.

 

Bobby, the Jew, nods fervently, seconding the kid’s sentiment.

  
Dean just releases a long-held breath and scrubs a hand across his face.

 

They stop a few minutes later, once they’re absolutely certain that nothing is following them, and Dean consults with Horse while the rest of the crew talks in too-loud voices about what they’ve just encountered.

 

“You know how to get to Sari’s from here?” Horse asks.

 

Dean’s shrug is telling.  “I have an idea,” he answers evasively.  “But a lot depends on the road conditions.”

 

So far, the road’s been shitty but passable—barely.

 

“As long as we don’t have to dodge that thing again,” Horse observes, leaving the rest unsaid.

 

A fifteen minute break leaves him refreshed enough to push on, and they all agree that they’d prefer to make it to their destination before dark.  Just because one monster doesn’t move around the res doesn’t mean others can’t.

 

Dean remembers some werewolves the first time he’d ever visited, recalls murders of sentry crows, too.  He’s pretty sure they’d have safe passage, but he doesn’t want to test his theory.

 

Luckily, Dean had spent enough time exploring the res with Bill, aka Coyote Runs at Night, to have a pretty decent idea of where they are now and where they have to go.  Their luck holds when the roads they need prove mostly clear.

 

Once they have to off-road it for a long stretch where the original hard-pack has been blasted away in an enormous crater that must run for a quarter-mile.

 

“What the fuck?” Feenie sums up.  Dean just grunts in agreement, too weary to speculate on what had caused the damage.

 

Twice they come to places where the road is drifted over, and they make their careful way through the worst of it.

 

At last, just as the sun is setting the low mountains to the west on fire, Dean sees a familiar red rock tower rising out of the orange earth.

 

Dean leaves everyone at the Jeeps.  It’s an indication of the solemnity of the place—the majesty of the red rock towering like a sentinel over them, casting them into premature shadow while the earth blazes to light in the sun’s last glory—that no one argues with him or urges a partner on him.

 

When he rounds the tower, a familiar figure limps out to greet him, her blonde muzzle grey, eyes milky with age.

 

“Cindy,” he croons, crouching to pet her.  Despite the changes, it’s still his girl, wide grin and lolling pink tongue ample evidence that she remembers him, too.

 

An ostentatious scuffing of the ground alerts him that his damp-eyed reunion is about to be interrupted, and Dean looks up a moment later to find Bill walking toward him.  The big Hopi looks like he hasn’t aged a day.  He’s tall, taller than Dean by three or four inches.  His broad span of shoulders seem destined to hold up the sky itself, and his hands, scarred from woodworking and whittling and the hard labor of life in this semi-arid land, are huge, something Dean had noticed before, usually with a mild frisson of desire he’d managed successfully to ignore.

 

The handsome face breaks into a smile, crow’s feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes, and in his deep, melodious voice Bill says, “She said you were coming.”

 

“Of course she did.”  Dean’s fond wryness isn’t lost on Bill, who snorts his agreement about the ways of the old and wily and indicates that Dean should go ahead of him to Sari’s one-room adobe home.

 

Dean steps into the room slowly, letting his eyes adjust to the relative dimness. 

 

“Light the lamp,” he hears from the direction where Sari had always had her bed.

 

Memories of many nights in the lamp-lit room fill him as he lights the oil lamp and puts it in the center of the scarred wooden table that was the true heart of the little house.

 

Then he turns to look at Sari, struggling to keep his reaction at the sight of her from his face.  She’s old—impossibly old—skin thin, bird-like bones bluish shadows beneath a translucent blanket of flesh, hands clawed and chest barely rising and falling.  Her eyes, dark and sharp as ever, assess him knowingly.

  
“I won’t break if you breathe on me,” she chides, patting the chair beside the bed where her visitors obviously sit.

 

He lowers himself carefully into the chair, still trying to keep his true reaction from his features.  He knew she was old—had been old when he’d met her, old when she’d rescued him from his resurrection in the desert—but somehow he’d managed to deny that she would someday die.

 

Die she will, though, and soon, he thinks, as is clear from her current state.  He’s seen enough death in its myriad forms to know it when it’s laid out before him.

 

“Stop brooding,” she snaps, voice as strong as ever.  “I’m not dying tonight, you know.”

 

Cindy picks that moment to shuffle into the house and nuzzle his hand with her wet nose.

  
“She missed you.”

 

“Me, too,” he answers, knowing they aren’t just talking about the dog.

 

There’s a pause while Sari’s eyes slide shut and Dean thinks she goes to sleep for a short while, and just as he’s considering standing up and sneaking outside, she says, “Don’t be rude, Dean.  Invite your friends in.”

 

Dean does as he told, getting as far as the door with the intention of walking back to the Jeeps.  Bill is in the yard, sitting on a stump and working on the figure of a crow no larger than the span of his thumb from the end of the nail to the first joint. 

 

“I’ll go,” he says, though Dean has told him nothing.  Still, he didn’t live eight months among the Hopi without coming to understand their ways.  He concedes without a word and returns to Sari’s side to watch her doze.

 

She murmurs up out of sleep once more when Horse clears his throat at the door.

  
“Ah, the Lakota,” Sari says and Horse gives Dean a narrow-eyed look.

  
“Don’t look at me,” Dean protests.  “I didn’t even know you were Lakota!”  It’s true.  Dean had pegged Horse for an Indian—his name alone had suggested it—but beyond that, he’d never thought it his business to ask.

 

Sari looses a rapid string of guttural syllables, which Horse answers in a surprised tone, face breaking out into a pleased smile at her words.

 

“You speak Hopi?” Dean asks Horse, wondering why the big man hadn’t mentioned it before.

  
“No,” Horse answers, shaking his head and pointing his chin at the old woman in the bed.  “She speaks Lakota.”

 

“Of course she does,” Dean replies, smiling.

  
Sari smacks him lightly on the arm.  “Don’t be smart.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”  But his tone is completely unrepentant.

  
One by one the others on the mission enter and are introduced.  One by one, Sari wins each of them over with a few words about their lives and loves.

 

Had Dean forgotten that Sari is a magic woman, she’d have reminded him amply that evening.  As it stands, he’s only strengthened in his conviction that coming here was the right thing to do.

 

His conviction is confirmed a few minutes later when Sari says to Bill, “Let us talk,” and Bill nods, goes to the door Dean’s only seen closed a handful of times, and pulls it shut behind his retreating back.

 

Dean watches Sari struggle to sit upright, helps to pile pillows at her back, lets her catch her breath without saying anything.  In fact, they sit in amiable silence as dusk deepens all around the wide ring of rosy light cast by the oil lamp on the table.  He begins to wonder if she has anything to say when she breaks the silence with, “I’m dying, you know, but it’s alright.  I’m returning to the stars, to my ancestors.”

 

Dean nods and clears his throat, trying to think of something to say.  Back in the early days of his recovery here, Bill had told him what the Hopi believe of the afterlife.  He’d pointed to the Pleiades and talked of star-homes where the heroes who have saved the people or died trying look down upon and watch over those yet living.

 

He’d also talked about how the Hopi believed that the world had ended before.

 

Dean asks Sari about that now, and she chuckles and pats his hand.  It’s the lightest of touches, but it reassures him that no matter how frail she appears, Sari is still Sari.

 

“Yet you still doubt the presence of a plan for us all,” she notes, humor rich in her low voice.  “I was just about to share with you the prophecy of the third end of the world.”

 

At the word “prophecy,” Dean has to stifle a groan.  In his experience, nothing good comes of God’s little preview reels. 

 

“When I was a little girl, my father would come home from all-night sessions in the kiva to sit beside the bed I shared with my older sister and younger brother.  He’d rock in his seat and pray over us in our language.  It frightened me, and one night, while the others slept on, I sat up and asked him why he was praying so hard, night after night.

 

He told me it was because the world was ending again.

 

‘The gourd full of ashes has fallen to the earth,’ he said.  ‘It has blasted the ground and made it so nothing will grow.  The people have grown corrupt, giving the White Man power over even our own sacred lands.  The White Man takes from those lands things he uses to destroy us all.  These are signs that the world is ending.

 

A savior will come, the Great White Man, and he will bring with him judgment.  He will summon two brothers—the older and the younger.  The older will seek for the younger all over the earth.  He will search for his brother, who is the keeper of the other sacred stone tablet.  When the brothers are united and the tablets laid side by side, then the Great White Man will reveal who will live and who will die, who is worthy of a new-made world and who must suffer death and return to the stars, and those who are too corrupted to live in either world.

 

You and your brother and your sister must follow the old ways,’ Father had said.  He moved us to this arroyo, guarded by the tower rock, and he taught us to live simply from the land, in the old ways of our people.

 

My brother went off to fight the White Man’s war across the sea, against the yellow people, and he did not come back.

 

My sister ran off with a government inspector who rode a motorcycle and told her she would be famous.  She took to drinking and drugs, and she died a few years after my brother.

 

That left only me, and I have done my best to fulfill my father’s vision for us.  Now I see that he was right.  Everything in the prophecy has come to pass except the last, the judgment.  You, Dean, and your King will deliver that to those who remain.”

 

At the first words about the brothers, Dean had felt his chest fill with ice.  Now, he blinks back involuntary tears, goosebumps rising along his arms and back, and shakes his head.  “No,” he starts, having to clear his throat and try again.  “No, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.  I’m not the man to judge anyone.  I’m not—.”

 

“You rose from the dead,” Sari points out, voice calm with the certainty of the faithful.

 

“Doesn’t make me a savior,” he answers, a little angry and a little afraid.  In the years since his mysterious resurrection after three days of death, Dean has come to accept that some mysteries don’t need to be solved.  Indeed, he hadn’t been interested in even skimming the surface of his raising.  He’s heard all sorts of interpretations over the years, had to disabuse more than one would-be prophet from proclaiming Dean this or that.  Burdened enough with the gift of healing he’d been given upon his resurrection, Dean has been satisfied with doing what he can with what he has. 

 

He doesn’t go looking for haloes and holy miracles.

 

“You talk as if yours is the only truth,” Sari notes, and now it’s her voice reflecting a little heat.  Dean at last works up the courage to look at her face.  He finds the expected hope shining from her dark eyes, but he sees there too a shadow of his own fear.  No one rushes toward judgment, not even, apparently, the wise and virtuous.

 

“If anything, I’m the older brother in that story, the one meant to help the Great White Man.”

 

Sari nods as if Dean has said something very, very right, and he realizes what he’s walked into almost immediately.

 

If the sacred stones were metaphoric, then what was born when he and Sam were side by side…

 

Which means that Jax…

_Shit._

 

“Tell me something.  Why’s the hero of a Hopi salvation story supposed to be a white man.  Didn’t the white men fu— screw up your lives enough?  You really gonna trust him with the survival of your people?”

 

Sari’s smile widens, and Dean wonders if maybe he should just stop talking, since it seems everything he says only digs him in deeper with this whole final judgment thing.

 

“Some of the elders always said that ‘white’ only meant pure, but many believed that because it was the coming of the white man that corrupted us this third time, it would only be through a white man that we could be saved.”

 

It has an elegant, if slightly twisted, logic, which Dean resists for all of a minute.  Then, simultaneously, Cindy heaves arthritically to her feet and nuzzles his palm and Sari says, “I’ll sleep now,” not unkindly, but with a definite tone of dismissal.

 

For as much as the conversation has been equal parts alarming and headache-inducing, Dean isn’t sure he’s ready for it to be over.  Still, he figures they’ll have time in the morning, so he whispers goodnight to her, though he can tell she’s already asleep, and tiptoes outside to find the rest of the crew.

 

They’re around the side of the house, in Sari’s narrow side yard, perched in and around the lightning-blasted tree that had been Dean’s favorite place of refuge in those long months of his healing.  There’s a big fire burning in the stone pit, and from the arroyo rim the familiar rustling of the sentinel crows assures Dean that all’s well in the canyon.

 

Bill is deep in conversation with Horse, but when he sees Dean, he beckons him over to sit beside them.  Dean’s never been intimidated by physical size, but flanked by the two Indians, he feels small.  It makes him uncomfortable and a little too aware.  As if sensing Dean’s unease, Horse gets up with a gruff, “I’ll grab our gear from the Jeeps and secure them for the night.”

 

As if it’s a prearranged signal, the rest of the crew gets up, too, and shuffles around the side of the hut back toward the tower and the darkness beyond.

 

“Subtle,” Dean says dryly, staring into the flames and appreciating their heat.  At his back, the desert air is cool.

 

“They mean well.”

 

“So, what now?”  Dean doesn’t pretend that Bill isn’t aware of the prophecy, and Bill does him the favor of not pretending in turn.

 

“Tomorrow, I take you to the kiva to meet with the Council.”

 

The way Bill says the word, Dean can hear the capital letter.

 

“Your elders?”

 

Out of the corner of his eye, Dean catches the big man’s head shake.  “No.  These are representatives of many tribes.  It is not just the Hopi who have prophecies.  The others have been arriving here for weeks, saying that they were called here and are waiting for a sign.”

 

“I take it I’m the sign?”

 

Bill nods decisively.

 

_Double shit._

 

Suppressing a mighty urge to sigh, Dean settles more comfortably on his deadwood seat and considers his position.  He may not be the elder brother.  Jax may not be the Great White Man (and hell if he isn’t going to have a good time explaining that one to Jax).  But assumptions are dangerous either way, so the best he can do is wait and see.

 

He sucks at waiting.

 

To pass the time, he asks Bill about the Council, but the big Indian is reticent.  “You’ll meet them tomorrow,” is all he’ll say.  So they talk instead about how Bill has been, what’s been happening around the reservation, and then, reluctantly, and both of them in hushed tones, as though something might overhear them, they talk of the skinwalker that had chased the convoy onto the reservation.

 

“All over it is the same—monsters out of legend coming to life, crawling out of the earth, dropping from the mountaintops, swimming up from the depths of the sea.”

 

It’s the closest Bill has ever come to sounding like Coyote Runs at Night, and Dean is aware of the other’s differences from him, the way that Bill, for all his ordinary-guy demeanor, is Hopi through and through.  Despite his time on the reservation, despite being welcomed and even—to his profound discomfort—revered for his resurrection act, Dean has never been one of the Hopi, not in an honorary way, not in any sense.

 

He’d never felt alien with Sari; the old woman had always welcomed Dean as though he was right where he belonged.  And Bill has never before reminded Dean that they come from two very different worlds, either.

  
Now, though, he’s struck by what he might be facing in the morning.  He may not have the right skills for this job, and he doesn’t want to fuck it up.  Suddenly, loneliness roars over Dean with a fierceness that leaves him breathless.  He misses Jax in an intense, almost physical way, like he’s been overcome with a hunger he can’t sate on his own.

 

Jesus, what the fuck is with him?

 

To mask how unsettled he feels, Dean asks Bill about Sari.  “How long has she been sick?”

 

“She’s not sick,” Bill explains patiently.  “Just old.  It’s her time.  Among my people, when we know the change is coming, we prepare for the path to the stars.  Sari has been ready for a long time now. I think she was just waiting for you.”

 

Bill says it simply, like it’s a matter of fact, and between his tone and the words themselves, Dean finds precious little to distract him from his sense of displacement.  It’s with enormous relief that he sees Bobby and the rest of the crew returning from the convoy, talking loudly to let Dean and Bill know that they’re approaching.

 

It doesn’t take long for them to set up tents and shake out bedrolls.  They’re bikers and soldiers, and in the snug curve of the arroyo, they find a degree of comfort and safety. Once the work is done, they return to the fire and start to talk, first in low voices to each other and then in general to the gathered crew and Bill.

 

Predictably, once Dean, Charming’s recognized expert in things that go bump in the night, has joined the circle around the fire, the discussion returns to the skinwalker.  For a change, though, Dean doesn’t have to say much.  Bill volunteers information about the creatures, about how, like Wendigos, skinwalkers were once human but through their own evil became supernatural monsters.

 

“Usually, they’re men who’ve killed a loved one—father, mother, sister or brother.  Sometimes they’ve killed their whole family—wife and kids or a whole clan.  They can change shape at will, but most often they’re wolves or coyotes.  They’re fast and strong and have no pity or remorse.” 

 

Bill goes on to say that skinwalkers are rare and most often live and make their kills in the lonely places in between pueblos or villages on reservations.

 

“You can’t bargain with them,” Dean adds when Bill has fallen silent.  “Mostly they just want to eat your face off.”

 

“But if they’re Indian monsters that eat Indians, why come after us?  And why couldn’t it come onto the reservation?  Shouldn’t it work the other way?” Reno asks the questions in a respectful tone, but it’s clear he’s still on the fence about these things, recent experiences notwithstanding.

 

Bill’s shrug is eloquent.  It says, _Who are we to ask questions of the gods?_

 

Dean snorts and translates, “Fuck all if we know.”

 

“The Council may have your answers,” Bill adds, and since cryptic isn’t his typical schtick, Dean lets it go just this once.

 

  1. They eat bean burritos with peppers that make them cough and sputter wrapped in flour tortillas heated on flat stones near the fire and drink mesquite-flavored tequila—Sample’s poison of choice—or whiskey (Dean’s) or ice cold water drawn fresh from Sari’s well (Bill’s).   



 

  1. He comes back long enough to say that she’s sleeping peacefully, Cindy on the floor at her side, and to reiterate their meeting time.



 

“Seven a.m.  I’ll meet you on the road side of the tower rock.”

 

Without another word, Bill walks around the hut and disappears, footsteps fading rapidly into the night.

 

Dean has a tent to himself, and despite the long drive and excitement of the last part of it, he can’t quite sleep.  He listens to the night noises and ponders his place in the next day’s plans, wonders how Jax is doing and if Sam is okay, and tries not worry about what it all means.

 

Eventually, he falls into a fitful slumber, broken now and again by the nearer yip of a coyote pup or the sharp caw of a crow startled by something at the arroyo’s rim.

 

Morning finds him sandy-eyed and yawning, enameled metal cup of passable coffee in one chilled hand.  Turns out Bobby’s not bad at breakfast by campfire either.

 

“You’re a man of many talents, Bobby,” Dean offers with a smile.

  
“Just one, spread out,” Bobby answers, handing Dean a mess kit dish full of eggs and sausage dusted with red pepper.

 

Dean’s eyes water and a sneeze threatens, but after the first mouthful, he’s content.  “You get this from Sari?”

 

“Yep,” Bobby says, handing Feenie a plate.  “She called me into the house when she heard me at the well.  Offered me the eggs and sausage.  When she saw me admiring the dried peppers, she offered those, too.  Nice lady.”

 

“That she is.”

 

When he’s finished his breakfast and a second cup of coffee, Dean draws enough water to splash his face and neck and tame his hair as best he can.  Then he stops in to say good morning to Sari, who is sitting up in bed, Cindy beside her resting her chin on the bedcovers.

 

“Thanks for breakfast, Sari.  It was delicious.”  
  
“That Bobby of yours is a good man,” she says.  “He knows his way around a frying pan.”  This with cheerful approval.

 

“He likes you, too.”

 

“Whatever they say to you today, Dean, remember that you have a place already in this world.  Remember who you are and don’t let them tell you any differently.”

 

The abrupt change of subject and Sari’s urgent tone throw Dean for a long span of breaths, and then he recovers his balance enough to ask, “You know something I should too?”

 

She shakes her head, looking suddenly weary.  “People are people.  Doesn’t matter how wise they think they are; if they don’t use what they’re given, they’ll go wrong.  You’ve used what God’s given you, Dean.  They can’t fault you for it, and they can’t tell you what to do.  Only God has that right…and maybe Jax,” she adds with a sly little smirk.

 

Dean’s still turning Sari’s warning over in his head when he meets Bill at the far side of the tower rock.  Bill’s standing next to an ancient blue-and-white Ford 150 with a bed cap and a bumper sticker that says, “FBI.  Full-blooded Indian.”

 

He climbs into the passenger seat and they head north and then west, across a Mars-scape of red rocks and silvery sagebrush.  The road is narrow with drift, but Bill drives like he’s used to the shudder of bad road and rooster-tailing when they bog down.

 

“A little farther,” Bill says after they’ve been driving for ten minutes.  Dean says nothing, content to watch the world roll by, trying hard not to think about what he might be getting himself into.

 

Soon enough, Dean sees buildings in the distance, and as they approach, he makes out a circle of wind-dulled, silver-sided Airstream trailers surrounding a low, circular adobe building.  It looks like a New Age mecca, one dream-catcher shy of a souvenir stand. 

 

Dean keeps the observation to himself.

 

Bill leads him at a crouch through the low entrance of the adobe building, and Dean’s surprised to find himself descending down a short series of shallow steps into a bowl-shaped circular space that smells strongly of packed earth, recent fire, and sage smoke.

 

Here, they have to bend over at the outer edge of the room, but where the floor slopes toward the center they can stand upright, barely.  The top of Bill’s head brushes the smoke-smudged ceiling.

  
The space is lit by a series of oil lamps suspended at intervals around the circle, and in the warm light he sees six men of indeterminate age.  Six pairs of eyes fasten on him, openly assessing, looking for something.

 

He wonders if they’ve found it and then realizes he doesn’t much care.

 

Still, he’s in their house—literally, in Bill’s case—so he’ll let them take the lead.  Bill ushers Dean into a seat on a wooden bench to the right of the aisle that leads down from the kiva entrance.  Bill himself takes the bench to Dean’s left, on the other side of the aisle.  They make up a roughly even octagon.

 

There’s a period of breathing silence while the unspoken evaluations continue, and then Bill says, “This is Dean Winchester, of Charming, California, the one of whom you’ve heard it spoken that he killed the white man’s devil, died, rose from the dead, and is now gifted with powerful medicine.”

 

At the best of times, Dean hates hearing his resume.  In the formal, somewhat foreign language of the kiva, it’s harder still to hear, as if by having survived, he’s somehow grown more rather than less obligated to the world for which he’s already sacrificed so much. 

 

The man to Dean’s right says, “Smoke, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”  Dean returns the man’s reticent nod.

 

It goes like that around the circle:  Jim Redfoot, Ute, Arizona; Manny Runs-the-Hills, Lakota, South Dakota; Jaybird, Kiowa, Kansas; Otter, Cherokee, Tennessee; and Rene, Huron, Ontario. 

 

The last startles a second look from Dean.  Peri, their communications officer, has been trying to reach points north of the country’s border for months now, ever since their friends in Washington State reported no contact with British Columbia. 

 

“There a lot of you up there?” Dean asks, forgetting what Bill had told him about speaking order and earning sharp looks from a couple of the other Council members but only a bored shrug from Rene himself.

“We do alright,” is all he says.

 

After another—pointed—silence, Jim Redfoot clears his throat and says, “We have formed this Council of the Indian Nations for two purposes:  First, to determine the cause of the changes we have all witnessed in the last three or four months; and second, to decide on the course of action best for all of our peoples.”

 

The way he says ‘our peoples,’ Dean knows very well Redfoot doesn’t mean him or any non-Indian.  He wonders if he should mention Horse, but before he can decide whether it would hurt or help his cause, Redfoot continues.

 

“So that Dean can understand our position, let us each tell him of the changes in our regions.”

 

A circle of short, sharp nods all around.

 

“I will begin.”

  
What follows is a catalogue of freak occurrences—upheaval of geography, changes in the weather, disappearances, reappearances, and most alarmingly, a notable increase in native monsters, both in numbers and in kind.

 

Redfoot tells them of skinwalkers, at least two dozen, reported from all corners of the Southwest.  “They don’t seem to bother with us, but we’ve found evidence that they hunt and kill along the highways that border reservation lands.  A few weeks ago, a party out on a supply run found the remnants of a whole Scavenger clan—trucks overturned, spent casings everywhere, but no human remains, just blood trails.  Our scout said it looked like more ‘n one of the ‘walkers took out at least ten or twelve people.  They’ve always been solitary monsters before now, but seems things have changed.”

  
Bill suggests that Dean tell the Council about the convoy’s run-in the day before.

 

He keeps it short, adding only, “My dad killed a skinwalker in Utah once for the Northern Ute band.  According to his journal, the thing was tough as hell to catch, but killing it wasn’t all that hard.  It took the usual—silver bullet through the heart—nothing special.”

 

“I think these skinwalkers are a different kind,” Redfoot says eventually, after a considering silence.  “ _Special_ ,” he adds.  His tone isn’t strictly neutral, and Dean can’t decide if the Ute is messing with him or if he’s just being funny.

 

 Jaybird, the Kiowa, goes next.  He speaks of a giant water monster, a kind of crocodile from hell by the sounds of it.  “Your white scientists tried to tell us our legend was based on the fossil record.  Too bad none of them lived long enough to be proven wrong.”

 

His bitterness sits uneasily with Dean, who isn’t used to being cast in the role of oppressor.  He says nothing, though, and when he gives Bill a speaking look, the Hopi offers an almost imperceptible nod of approval.

 

Smoke talks of a dragon that lives at the top of a mountain and takes to the sky to blast the earth clean with his fiery breath.  “Our stories say that’s how the Crater of the Moon got made, but in the old legends, there’s only one of these monsters.  We’ve seen at least five in the last six months or so, and they aren’t particular about what part of the country they’re in, either.”

 

“Yeah, we know about those,” Dean says.  “One of them took out one of our Expedition vehicles not far from Twin Falls.” 

 

Otter speaks of the Stone Man who devours people he has tricked into his company.  “He passes by our houses and does not bother us in the woods, but we’ve heard from the white people in Pigeon Forge that he has been seen there several times and has killed at least two that they know of.”

 

Rene is tight-lipped, saying only, “Many of the old creatures have returned.  Monsters swim in the Great Lakes, giant birds cast the land in shadow.  Many say that Tawiskarong is creating evil once more and that his brother, Tijuskeha, will not stop him until the world is once more in balance.”

 

Dean nods like he knows what that means and reflects, not for the first time this morning, that his brother Sam would’ve eaten this folklore shit up.

 

Manny seems to have been saved for last.  He gets a longer pause than any of the rest.  He appears to be the eldest of Council.  His mahogany skin is etched with deep lines; his long braid is mostly silver, threaded through here and there with midnight black strands.  His head shakes in the palsy of old age, but his voice does not.

 

He speaks of a time when the People were dying, slaughtered by the white men who came to the Plains.  He talks of the promise of the Ghost Dance, in which the People took comfort when things were darkest.  “We were told that if we danced the dance, our savior would come.  First, the White Buffalo would appear.  Then, the Paha Sapa would open, and from within would pour out all the buffalo that had been lost, all of our horses, every good green crop that had been trampled, all the waters that had been poisoned by white settlements.  The People would be strong again, and we would reclaim the land.  Many believed it.  Many died when the Great White Father in Washington forbade the dancing and the horse soldiers came and killed our women and our children.

 

But we have outlived the Great White Father, and no more do the horse soldiers come.  There are buffalo again—many—on the Plains, and our horses run like low-flying clouds over the grasslands.  The People live again and are strong, and this spring, a white buffalo calf was born to the White River herd.”

 

With Manny’s last words, an expectant hush falls over the assembled men.  The air in the kiva feels suddenly heavy, weighted with import.  Dean half expects one of them to fall to the floor and start speaking in the unnatural voice of a prophet.

 

When that doesn’t happen, when they’ve sat motionless, in utter silence, for several minutes, Dean risks shifting on the hard wooden bench.  His ass is asleep and he needs to stretch his legs.

 

“We’ll take a break now,” Bill says then, in a normal tone of voice, and whatever spell had fallen over them is broken.  They rise in ones and twos, making their way to a table against the wall near the door, where there’s a pitcher of liquid—spring water, Dean discovers, the mineral taste sharp on his tongue—and a basket with a familiar blue-and-white checked towel covering a neat stack of sweet cornbread squares.

  
He recognizes Sari’s handiwork and cannot help but smile.  Even here, she is reminding Dean to keep his cool.  He can practically hear her saying, “Don’t be an ass.”

 

After a few minutes of idle chatter, from which Dean’s mostly excluded, they go back to their places and begin again with the silence.

Thankfully, it lasts only a minute or two, and then Redfoot asks, “Is it true that you are Consort to the man you call ‘King of the World’?”

 

There is a cynical snort from Jaybird, and Dean sees that most in the Council wear a disdainful expression, but no one comments.

 

“If you mean am I married to Jax Teller, then yes, that’s true.  As to him being ‘King of the World,’ there are plenty of people who’d agree with me and not too many who could say otherwise.  Present company excluded, of course.”

 

A stony silence follows his pronouncement, but Dean’s grown used to it by now.  He learned a long time ago, when you’re being interrogated, keep your mouth shut unless you’re asked a question.  Cops love to let the silence linger so you’ll incriminate yourself.

 

So he waits.

 

Eventually, Redfoot demands, “Tell us what else you and your people have encountered.”

 

“You want strictly the Indian boogety-boogety or all of ‘em?”

 

Redfoot narrows his eyes and Jaybird takes in a hard breath as if he’s about to break the speaking code of the kiva.

  
Bill gets there first.  “What Dean means—.”

 

“I said what I mean,” Dean interrupts, but his voice is even and free of the anger he feels building slowly in his gut.  “I grew up hunting all kinds of evil.  Native, non-native—doesn’t really matter.  Evil is evil.  It comes, we kill it.  End of story.  So I’m asking you, do you want to hear only about the evil that comes from your lore, or do you want to hear about every evil thing I’ve hunted and killed?  ‘Cause I gotta say, if it’s that second one, we’re going to be here awhile, and you might want to order out for some sandwiches.”

 

A different kind of silence follows Dean’s words.  It’s clear that most of the Council aren’t sure what to say and the one or two who has something in mind isn’t sure he should say it.

 

They all seem surprised when it’s Manny who next speaks.

 

“I think for the time being it would serve our purposes best for you to speak of the ‘Indian boogety-boogety’ only.”

 

This time, Dean’s sure it’s amusement he hears in the old man’s voice.

 

“Sure,” he says, nodding, and launches into a succinct summary of what the Expedition had encountered in its last four weeks before the remnants of it had finally returned home.

 

Some of what he describes the Council has already identified, but three things he can’t account for:  the so-called “time warp” near Salina, the “harpies” outside of Flagstaff, and the giant that ate Wood.  The first makes little sense to him; the second seems out of place unless a new colony of Greek refugees had recently set down roots in Arizona, which seems unlikely.  The third is just fucking unbelievable.

 

For the first time there is no pause after Dean finishes speaking.

 

Jaybird says, “Sendé” at almost the same moment as Manny says, “Coyote,” and while what Jaybird’s said doesn’t ring any bells, Manny’s word sure as hell does.

  
“Fuck,” Dean breathes, forgetting his company for a moment.  He feels like ten kinds of stupid.  “A trickster!  I should’ve picked up on that.  We ran into one once, maybe six years ago… .  But that turned out to be…”

  
He realizes he’s trailed off and that every member of the Council is looking at him strangely, waiting for him to finish his sentence.  When it becomes clear to them that Dean’s not going to speak again, Manny says, “Coyote loves to use his powers to fool the white man.  He likes nothing better than playing tricks on the arrogant and entitled.”

  
Dean is still caught in remembering what had happened to him and Sam the first time they’d encountered the “Trickster,” who had, in fact, turned out to be the angel Gabriel.  Though time has dulled the immediate anguish of losing Sam, it hasn’t made it easier for Dean to deal with the hole his brother has left in his life.  Right now, he’s wishing Sam were here to talk through this Trickster time warp thing with him.

 

It’s Bill who says, “Dean?” in a quiet, penetrating way, and when Dean looks up from where his eyes have been fixed to the ground between his boots, he sees concern and understanding on Bill’s face.

 

“Sorry,” he says, and he has to clear his throat.  “My brother and I ran into a Trickster—or what we thought was a trickster—,” he waves a hand, dismissing the whole fucked up mess with the gesture—“and I was just thinking about what a pain in the ass he was.  We got caught up in this time loop thing.  Took my brother forever to figure it out.”

 

There are a few grunts of agreement and general smirks of approval that their Trickster has taken to victimizing Dean’s people.

 

Bill says then, “These bird-like creatures sound like Tsanahale.  They are Navajo, but they haven’t been seen since the old times.”

 

“The giant could be from any number of tribes,” Smoke offers.  “All up and down the coast, there are stories of giants.”

 

Dean nods.  “Yeah, we ran into an abominable snowman about four months ago.  We figured it had to be native to the area.  By all accounts, this giant was even bigger and stronger than the other, and it didn’t have hair all over its body.”

 

Smoke shrugs, “Still…”

 

“The crows are pretty ubiquitous, too,” Otter adds.  “But in most of our stories, Crow isn’t malicious.  He might like to have fun with the wicked or the foolish, but he isn’t a killer.”

 

This gets a general round of approving noises.

 

“Like the skinwalkers, it may be that these giants and crows are special,” Redfoot says, bringing the room to order with his observation.  “We must think on all that we have heard and said today and reconvene tomorrow to consider the second part of our purpose, how we must respond to these changes.”

 

Dean knows a dismissal when he hears one, and he rises, unsure of how to take his leave.  Bill gets up, too, though, and says, “Thank you,” and moves for the kiva’s only door.  Dean follows suit, keeping the thanks as civil as he can.

 

He’s surprised to find that the sky is full of light, the sun only halfway toward the horizon.  For a moment, he suffers a strange dislocation, the feeling so much like he used to get when he’d emerge into daylight after a matinee movie that he half expects to see Sam beside him, about to ask him some geeky question about what they’d just watched.

  
When he comes back to himself and sees Bill there, silhouetted against the sunlight behind him, tall and broad-shouldered and with shaggy dark hair, he almost lets slip his brother’s name.  He catches it with a sound in his throat and shakes off the feeling, angry at himself for his sudden weakness.

  
He’s gone months—almost a year, maybe—without an episode like this.  What the fuck is wrong with him?

 

Beside him in the truck on the way back to Sari’s place, Bill keeps quiet of a different kind.  When they’ve got only a few miles left, he asks, “Back there…did you have a vision?”

 

Dean starts in his seat and turns to give Bill a searching look.  “No.  Why?”

 

“You looked as I’ve seen others look when they’ve slipped into the between state.”

 

“Oh.”  Dean really doesn’t know what else to say to that.  But Bill saw Dean when his grief was brand new, when every breath scraped over the raw place on his chest that marked only the outward sign of a much deeper and graver kind of damage.  “I was just…  I’ve been thinking about Sam a lot more lately, that’s all.”

 

“Maybe it’s being back here.” Bill’s tone and words are reasonable, but Dean can’t quite accept that it’s so simple. He doesn’t argue with Bill, though, saying, “Yeah, maybe that’s it,” like he believes it.  He’s pretty sure the big man isn’t buying Dean’s line, but neither of them says any more, and the rest of the trip is made in companionable quiet.

 

Back at Sari’s, he finds the crew taking turns around an enormous, steaming pot, and when he comes close enough to smell the peppers, he knows they’re making Bobby’s famous chili.

 

“Sari invited some people over for dinner,” Bobby explains, adding freshly diced hot peppers to the already nose-stinging concoction.

 

“Great,” Dean says, trying to sound enthusiastic.  He’s tired and disquieted, and he needs time to think.  Still, he’s never been a prima donna, and he loves Bobby’s chili.

 

“What can I do?” he asks.

 

“Help Sari with the cornbread?”

 

Dean is no gourmand, and he’ll never be totally comfortable in a kitchen, but he couldn’t have spent eight months in Sari’s house without learning to make cornbread.  Inside the little adobe hut, he finds Feenie working at the table while Sari directs him from her bed.

 

“Oh, I’m glad you’re here,” she says after raking his face and apparently finding confirmation of her suspicions in his expression.  “Chet’s a good boy, but he’s not much of a cook.”

 

It takes Dean a minute to remember that Feenie’s real name is Chet.  For his part, the kid blushes and steps aside to rinse off his cornflour-coated hands.

 

“Molasses is here,” he offers, nodding in the direction of a clay jug on the sink-board.

 

“Thanks,” Dean says.  “Go clean up and see about chopping more wood for the fire.  I think we’re going to need a big blaze.”

 

Feenie, looking relieved to be given a task he can actually accomplish, gives Sari a shy smile and exits.

  
“They gave you a hard time,” Sari says after a few minutes of blessed quiet, during which Dean had worked the thick, black molasses into the cornflour mixture.

 

“Yeah, but I charmed ‘em,” Dean answers lightly, stirring the mixture and preparing to pour it into the wet corn-husks laid out on the sink-board for that purpose.

 

“No doubt.”  Her answer is dry as the dust in the bottom of the corn-flour sack.  “They’re just afraid, Dean.  You’ve experienced it yourself.  The world is changing, and they aren’t ready.  They’ve always talked a good game, but they never believed it would actually happen.  Then, when the world ended for others, they were convinced it was only meant for outside, for non-Indians.  Now that the signs are coming clear for us, too, well…”

 

He concentrates on pouring the batter carefully into the corn-husks, which are tied off at each end with wire to keep the batter from seeping out into the fire.  She’d never let him do most of this before; always it had been her quick and able hands stirring the batter, pouring it.  That she’s letting him do it isn’t a mark of his ability but a measure of her decline, a reminder of her imminent death, and it makes him sad.

 

“I’m still here,” she snaps sharply, voice as strong as ever it was.  Cindy yips, startled from her sleep on the floor next to the bed.

 

The sheepish look he gives her seems to mollify her somewhat.  She smiles knowingly at him and says, “Better get those to the flat stones by the fire, or they won’t be ready when the chili’s done.”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and if his voice is a bit husky, neither of them mentions it.

 

At the fire, he arranges the husks as he’d been instructed, getting an expected share of shit.

 

“Well, if it ain’t Martha Stewart,” Reno says, grin on his face.

 

“She was a demon, you know,” Dean answers off-handedly, carefully rescuing a husk that had rolled a little too close to the flames.

 

“What?”

“A demon.  Yellow-eyed.  Mean motherfuckers.  Send you to hell soon as look at you.  How’dye think she made it so big?”

 

“Didn’t she go to prison?” Sample asks.

 

Dean shrugs.  “Way I hear it, she planned it that way.  Wanted to collect on some debts.  Poor saps had gone to jail to try to outsmart her.”

 

“You’re shitting us,” Bobby insists, turning his eyes away from the chili pot to search Dean’s face.

 

But Dean shakes his head, expression sober.  “God’s my witness.”

 

They all wait, frozen, for a betraying rumble of thunder.  Then Horse laughs, a loud, braying sound that gets them all started.

 

“Who else?” Feenie asks after the laughter has died to wheezes and wet eyes.

 

“What?” Dean’s watching the cornbread in its husk wrappers and pulling on a longneck that Bill had produced magically from a bucket down in the well.

 

“Any other celebrity demons?”

  
“Oprah,” Bobby says before Dean can answer the kid.

 

The subject keeps them occupied until Bobby declares the chili done.  Dean collects the husks from the flat stones using tongs, opens them steaming and golden onto plastic plates, and fixes a bowl and square of the sweet, spicy bread for Sari, who takes it with a smile.

 

When Dean tries to sit at the kitchen table and eat with her, she shoos him outside.  “You smell like beer!” she gruffs, but he knows it’s all a cover.  When he comes back in a few minutes later, she’s asleep, and her chili’s hardly been touched.  The cornbread is gone, but there are suspicious crumbs around where Cindy is resting her head on her paws, looking up at him with big _Who me?_ eyes.

 

Sighing, he cleans up the bowl and sweeps up the crumbs and leaves the two old girls to sleep.

 

That night, he dreams of Jax spread naked and straining on their bed, hands wrapped around the headboard, hips stuttering upward toward Dean, who is straddling him, preparing to slide onto his hard, red cock.  Lubricant glistens obscenely the length of Jax’s cock, makes snail-trails on the sparse hair of his belly.  Dean’s own cock is achingly hard, and he’s just reaching to stroke it in time with his descent, just feeling the head of Jax’s cock stretch his hole, when he’s awakened by the cacophony of panicked crows, a deafening racket that brings his hammering heart into his throat.

  
He’s out of his tent before he thinks about the hard-on tenting his boxers, ignores the startled looks and nervous laughter of the crew, staring hard at the arroyo rim, wondering what’s gotten into the birds.

 

Bill approaches as Dean’s doing up the laces on his boots, alarm having taken care of his arousal enough to put on his jeans without endangering his manhood.

 

The crows are still talking to each other, wild squawks that bounce off the arroyo walls and reverberate.

 

“Any idea what’s gotten into them?”

 

Bill’s expression is dark, his nod tight.  Without a word, he beckons Dean to follow him with a gesture.  He doesn’t speak until they’re in his truck, presumably heading back to the kiva for day two of the proceedings. 

 

“Jaybird had a vision last night.  This morning, we could not awaken him.  Manny says it’s because Jay is walking between two worlds.  I think he needs a doctor, but they aren’t interested in white man’s medicine.”

 

Dean has a bad feeling about where Bill is going with all of this.

  
“You want me to heal him?”  He lets every ounce of disbelief and frustration color his tone.  “Yesterday, Jaybird practically called me a stain on the land and destroyer of peoples.  Today you want me to put my hands on him?  You forgetting the whole ‘the white man’s god isn’t our god’ thing?”

 

“I think until we all agree that there is only one god, we’re going to have problems.  Maybe your healing Jaybird will show the Council that you have power from a greater source, that you don’t need the Council to solve your people’s problems.”

 

Dean’s forced to admit that Bill has a point…actually several, and pretty good ones at that.

  
“Oh,” is all he says, but he tries to make the syllable mean everything he’s not otherwise saying.

  
Bill seems to get it.  He tosses Dean a husk of cornbread left over from last night’s feast and points to a fresh cup of coffee in the passenger side cup-holder.

 

“You’re awesome,” Dean breathes over the steaming brew.  It smells heavenly and tastes better.  “Dude, if we can make a trade agreement for some of this coffee, I’ll do whatever the hell you want.”

 

Bill’s smirk is both smug and suggestive, which makes Dean re-evaluate his assumptions about Bill’s preferences.  Of course, he’d never go there.  For one thing, it’s bad politics to sleep with the people you’re trying to negotiate with.  For another, he really loves Jax and has no interest in straying.

 

 _Still…a little flirtation is good for the soul_ , he reflects, sparing a glance out of the corner of his eye for Bill’s big, powerful hands on the wheel.

 

Flirtation reminds him of J.C., which makes him a little homesick, and he finishes his impromptu breakfast without another exchange.  When they arrive at the circle of trailers, he expects that they’ll go into the kiva again, but Bill leads him instead to the Airstream nearest where they’ve parked.

 

“He’s in here.”

 

Sighing, Dean pinches the bridge of his nose, runs a hand through his hair, and composes his expression for the coming task.  It’s not that he begrudges the Council a chance to see him at work.  It’s not even that he doesn’t particularly like Jaybird.  Mostly, Dean doesn’t relish wiping himself out trying to put this guy back together and then having to rely on Bill to get him back to Sari’s without embarrassing himself.

 

At St. Thomas’, Dean has back-up.  Even when he’s working alone, Tara or Doc Maartens is no more than a call-button away.  Here…

 _Man up_ , he tells himself, following Bill in to the dim interior of the trailer. 

 

It’s more spacious inside than he’d expected.  There’s an oval table, around which four of the Council are ranged.  Past the galley kitchen and the tiniest bathroom Dean’s ever seen is an open door leading to a bedroom, where Jaybird is laid out on a generous double mattress and Manny is beside him, smudging him with sage-smoke and an eagle’s feather.

 

“Let me guess,” Dean says without preamble.  “The Reclamation is upon us?”

 

Manny gives him a quizzical look, eyes tracking to Bill as though he’s Dean’s translator.

 

Bill shrugs.

  
“He didn’t talk about the four-leggeds and the beasts under the earth and in the sky?”  Dean’s paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of Sam’s and Chuck’s visions.

 

Now it’s Manny’s turn to shrug.  “We don’t speak Kiowa.”

 

Oh.

 

“Alrighty, then,” Dean says, rubbing his hands together with mock-briskness.  In a faux-cheerful tone, he continues, “Let’s see what we can do to get you on your feet.”

 

Manny gives Bill another look, this one suggesting that perhaps Dean has lost his mind and will do more harm than good.

 

Dean doesn’t much care if they decide against him working on Jaybird.  It’s not like it was his idea to begin with.  Still, healing is healing, and he guesses he’s got the gift for a reason.

 

“Let me work, okay?”

 

Manny hangs fire for a little while, as though he might protest, but with a gesture, Bill indicates that the old Lakota should leave the bedroom, and Bill follows him out, closing the door behind him.

 

For all that Jaybird is a stranger to him, Dean recognizes what’s causing his pain immediately—it’s the same off-kilter, tilt-a-whirl sensation he’d had when he was helping to bring Sam out of unconsciousness, the same oily, unpleasant feeling that had been multiplied ten-fold in Chuck.  Jaybird has a mild case compared to the ex-prophet, though he’s worse off than Sam was.

  
Dean briefly considers the possibility that age has something to do with the severity of the after-effects and then reminds himself that he’s not actually a doctor and so should probably stick to the mojo rather than trying actual medical shit.

 

Putting the flat of his hand to Jay’s forehead, Dean feels around inside of him, for lack of a better way of putting it.  Closing his eyes and centering himself, focusing on his breath, he sinks into the man’s energy and tries to trace the ugly grey streak of poison back to its source.  Once he’s done that, he can start untangling it from the man’s regular, healthy energy.

 

Every time Dean tries to explain what it’s like to do healing work, even if only to himself, he comes off sounding like a hippie who dropped too much of the brown acid, so he’d long ago given up trying.  Still, in odd moments, like this one, he finds himself both in the healing and also outside of it, observing his own practices.

 

It’s a strange and unsettling feeling, one he particularly dislikes.  But he’s trained long enough now and had enough meditation work with Melissa and Joan to manage it, and soon enough, he’s found the problem with Jaybird’s energy and is doing the hard work of healing.

 

He loses time, and when he comes back to the room, it’s hotter than hell, he’s soaked in sweat, swaying like a willow in a wind storm, and Jaybird is grumbling up out of his coma.

 

Dean stumbles backward, equilibrium shot, and he would have fallen if the wall hadn’t been three feet from the bedside.  As it is, he’s slumped there, head down and eyes closed, probably the picture of misery when Bill and Manny come back in.

 

Bill helps Dean out of the room.  Back in the group area of the trailer, the Council members fall quiet at the sight of him.  They give him a variety of looks as he’s led out into the fresh, dry air—disbelief, annoyance, reassurance, confusion.

 

Once Bill seats him at a picnic table under an awning on the next trailer over and presses a cup of cold water into Dean’s hand, Dean’s world starts to steady.  The swooping feeling in his stomach is drowned by the refreshing water, and the air helps to sharpen his focus and blow the last of the muffled thrumming out of his head.

 

“Okay?” Bill asks, looking concerned.

 

“Yeah,” Dean answers.  Apparently, his tone is unconvincing because Bill’s expression only deepens in anxiety.  “It takes a lot out of me,” he offers then, waving a hand as if to suggest that this is all just par for the course.  “How long?” he asks, too wiped out to look at his watch.

 

“Almost four hours.”

 

Dean squints at the sun-bleached sky, registers for the first time the intense heat even in the shade.

 

“We have time for the meeting?”

 

Bill shrugs.  “We’ll see.”

 

After a short silence in which Dean realizes he’s starving and that he smells like he’s been rolling around in sweaty gym socks, Redfoot and the rest, minus Jay, come out of the trailer and move toward the kiva.  At the back of the line, Manny pauses to give Bill and Dean a jerk of his head.

 

That’s the only invitation they get.

 

Dean’s expecting another long, wrangling “discussion,” during which he’s dragged onto the carpet and raked over the coals, a whole line of clichés that add up to giving Dean a heap of shit.  He’s got a pounding headache, probably from dehydration, and he’s hungry.  He wants nothing more than to be home naked in his shower built for two having Jax wash his back and tell him ridiculous lies about what went on while Dean was away.

 

Instead, he’s trapped in the dense, dim air of the kiva with five people who don’t much like him and Bill, who so far hasn’t really acted as his advocate so much as his handler.

 

He’s just about to take things into his own, probably incapable, hands, when Manny says, “We owe you a great debt, Dean.”

 

The others nod with varying degrees of vigor.

 

“You have shown that you are gifted indeed with the spirit of a higher power.  I do not think we need question you further about your worthiness to represent your people.  I also suspect that the others are in agreement when I say that you are the sign and messenger we have been waiting for.”

 

Again, a round of nods.

 

Dean’s never been gladder to have misjudged a situation.  He’s pretty sure if he doesn’t get some water, aspirin, and a dark room soon, he’s going to throw up.  It’s been known to happen after an especially challenging session.

 

Redfoot picks up where Manny has left off.

 

“We have shared our ideas with one another all night and have come to a unanimous conclusion.  Regardless of our individual tribal stories or the variations in our religious beliefs, we all recognize that there is a force at work greater than ourselves or the combined power of even our greatest medicine men, shaman, and cassekeys.  The Ancestors are returning to the land so that we may once again take our rightful place upon it.  Those who do not belong have only two choices:  Join with us in harmony, sharing the earth, or oppose the natural order and be destroyed.”

 

As ultimatums go, it’s a pretty good one.  Doesn’t leave much room for interpretation, Dean reflects, closing his eyes against a particularly vicious spike of pain in his head.  Thankfully, given his reduced capacity for higher functions of thought, Dean doesn’t have to make a decision right then.

 

As Redfoot himself pointed out, Dean is just the messenger.  So he’s going to carry the message back to Charming, let Jax present it to the Confederacy, and see what happens.

 

He says as much, in short, slurred phrases, to the Council, who seem satisfied with his answer despite its relative incoherence.

 

When the meeting adjourns, Bill has to hold him by the elbow to get him up the short flight of stairs and out of the kiva.  By the time they make it to Bill’s truck, the big Hopi is half-carrying Dean.

 

Dean’s far enough gone not to care about the humiliation factor, though, and he loses time again—and probably consciousness—on the ride back to Sari’s.  He comes to in his tent, and by the quality of the waning light he can discern through the screened window in the tent’s zippered door, it’s almost dark.  He’s been out of it for awhile.

 

When he stumbles out of his tent, he’s greeted by Bobby, who wordlessly hands him a cold beer and a bowl of reheated chili.  Horse points to a seat of honor, an aluminum-framed lawn chair with a sagging woven plastic seat of washed-out blue.  Dean sinks into it and concentrates on not dribbling beer down his chin.

 

After awhile, he feels more human and manages to recognize the topic of conversation:  bad-asses they’ve each encountered and how they took care of them.  When he’s eaten a bowl and a half of chili and chased it down with his third beer, Dean feels competent to throw in his own story.

 

By tacit agreement, his killing the Devil is disqualified for consideration.  Wouldn’t be much of a contest if that one counted.

 

Instead, he talks about a werewolf he and his father hunted back in the winter of ’95 in northern Michigan.  The climate there and then was about as different from the here and now as any two places can be, but such is the nature of Dean’s storytelling that he raises a shiver in not a few of the rapt audience.  Given that not too long ago some of these men were scornfully skeptical of the more supernatural elements of Dean’s resume, he calls it a win when they hoot and holler over the werewolf’s final and bloody demise.

 

After checking in on Sari—sleeping—and giving Cindy a good head-scratch, he returns to his tent, not sure he’ll sleep but willing to give it a shot.

 

He doesn’t even remember his head hitting the pillow.

  
Bright morning sun and raucous crows’ calls awaken him to another beautiful day.  The others have already packed up their tents and prepared breakfast; they’re sitting around the fire talking in careful voices when Dean climbs out of the tent and stretches loud and long.

 

Once they see him up and about, their voices return to a normal volume.  Bobby offers him a plate of scrambled eggs with chiles, spicy chorizo, and flatbread and tells him that Sari wants to see him when he’s finished.

  
He takes his plate into the hut and finds Sari sitting at the kitchen table, Cindy close at her side, head in her lap.

  
“Hey,” he says, surprised and relieved to see Sari up and about.

 

“It’s about time, lazybones,” she answers with a wink.  Those were the same words she’d used to greet him when he’d awoken for the first time in her hut after his resurrection.  In the sudden rush of memory, it’s like he’s never left here, and with an involuntary motion, Dean clutches his chest, where the mounded scar tissue assures him that time has, in fact, passed.

 

“Sit with me.”

 

He slides into his usual seat on her right side, back to the sink and within arm’s reach of the sink-board.  He settles there for a spell, enjoying the familiarity, happy to have Sari out of bed and beside him once more.

 

“You’re the right man for the job,” she says eventually, no preface or explanation for her words.

 

But though he nods, he knows his uncertainty must be reflected in his face.  He’s still tired and off-kilter; the whole trip has made him feel strange and out-of-place.

 

“You belong to both worlds—our world and the world out there.”  She makes a gesture that manages to encompass the entire Western world, sans Indians.

“How do you figure?”  By his count, Dean’s something of a freak show in either venue, but he doesn’t say it out loud.

 

“You understand our ways.  You feel the energy of this place in your bones—that’s why you’ve been feeling strangely now that you’re back.  And you have hunted the things that live on the fringes of both societies, yours and ours.”

 

He thinks it’s a curious distinction—that killing Indian monsters makes him more Indian—but again, he keeps the thought to himself.

 

“Anyway, you can carry the message well enough, and who better than you to explain the importance of our people in the greater scheme?  You must know that is why you were brought back here when you returned from the other world.”

 

It’s already well-established that Dean leaves the big mysteries to other people’s solving, but this is one of the few he’s never been quite able to let go. 

 

Why hadn’t he been brought back where he’d died, in Charming, given over to the care of Jax, with whom he had an obvious and immediate connection?

 

Why had he been dropped naked in red rock country, where the burning sky reflected and threw back upon him the searing heat of his terrible wounds?

 

Why had he been given to Sari for healing?  Why had Bill become his counselor in a time of terrible need?

 

He resists the idea that the answer is as simple as Sari suggests, that it was planned all along so that Dean could fulfill his role in the current crisis.  He wants to call _Bullshit_ and tell her that she’s nuts.  But Sari has never been wrong about anything, as far as Dean knows, and anyway, it’s rude to sass his elders.

 

Besides, he has a sinking feeling that she’s hit the coffin nail square on the head.

 

_Goddamnit._

 

“I kinda figured it was so that I could become the sacred keeper of your cornbread recipe,” Dean deadpans, trying to save the moment from heavy drama.

 

Sari slaps his arm but laughs, a short crowing sound that makes Cindy yip in happy approval and sets the crows on the arroyo rim cackling along with her.

 

Bill’s shadow blocks the light in the door, and Dean knows that’s his signal to leave.  The Hopi is coming with them, whether to act as an interpreter for the Council or to make sure Dean doesn’t screw up, he’s not sure.  Either way, he’s glad to have the extra support.

 

Dean stands up, washes his plate, spoon, and cup, and leaves them drying on the ubiquitous checkered towel on the sink-board.  It’s just like old times, just like he’s leaving for a morning’s walk or to run an errand for her.

 

Then he leans over to kiss Sari on her cheek, a rare enough gesture of affection that she actually blushes and giggles.

A surprisingly strong hand grasps his wrist as he’s about to turn away.  He can feel his pulse echoing off of her fragile fingertips.

 

“No matter what happens, Dean, remember who you are.  Nothing else matters but that.  If you remember who you are, everything else will fall into place.”

 

As advice goes, it seems a little generic, but when he searches her face for hidden meaning, he finds there only the simple, powerful light of truth given to the very young and the very old.

 

He embraces her carefully once more, whispers, “Thank you,” in her ear, and then starts away as he feels a sharp pinch on his ass.

 

He exits gracelessly to her hoots of laughter.

 

Cindy pads after him as far as the tower, and he crouches down to give her a last, long head-scratch. 

 

“You take care of her,” he says, and she huffs and grins, tongue lolling.

 

That’s the last he sees of either of his old girls.

 

*****

 

 

 

_Coyote is a Trickster, a demi-god with power over time and space. He can make time stand still, so it appears as though nothing will ever change again. Or he can Rip Van Winkle you into the future, making you believe you’ve lost everything and everyone you’ve ever known and loved.  And he can do it again and again and again._

 

 _Journal of a Crazy Indian_ (1989), John Wind-in-the-Trees

 

Jax’s first thought when he sees the tall Indian climb out of the passenger side of the Jeep Dean’s driving is, _That one is seriously fuckable_.

  
His second thought is decidedly less decent.

 

Dean is also out of the Jeep, but he’s facing the tall guy over the roof of the vehicle, foot propped on the lower door jamb, jeans stretched tight across his ass.  It’s only been a few days, but Jax has missed Dean more than he’d expected to.  More than he’ll admit, except maybe to himself.

 

Dean half-turns, and Jax catches the expression on his face, a wide smile, open, laughing eyes, an ease that Jax isn’t used to seeing Dean exhibit around people he doesn’t know very, very well.

 

Which means Dean knows this guy pretty damned well.

 

Something curls unpleasantly through Jax’s gut, but he shrugs it off and moves toward the Jeep.  If the kiss he lays on Dean is less chaste and a lot longer than their usual public displays of affection, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that the Indian is watching.

 

Dean’s gratifyingly dazed expression drives away the lingering coil of unease in Jax’s belly, and he turns toward the stranger with a smile.

  
“Jax, this is Bill.  Bill, Jax.”

 

“Heard a lot about you,” Bill says, shaking Jax’s hand.

 

“You, too,” Jax lies.  In fact, he can count on one hand the number of times Dean has talked of his eight months on the reservation with Sari, and though Dean had mentioned Bill a couple of those times, Jax had had no idea what the guy would be like.

 

That uneasy feeling in his stomach is back again.  Jax tells himself it’s not jealousy.  Dean might’ve once been the biggest player in the pre-apocalypse, but Jax trusts him, knows he’s faithful now.  These days, Dean doesn’t go off the reservation.

  
So to speak.

 

And even if Dean and Bill had had a thing once upon a time, that time is long over, right?

 

Jesus, he’s turning into a girl.

 

Only later, after introductions and dinner, after Dean has seen Sam, whom Sally had brought by to show Dean how well the kid is doing.  After Dean had been assured that Ope is healing up, home and resting, and Gracie is out of the hospital, too.  After he’s cuffed his hand around the back of Juice’s neck and pulled him into a half-hug.  After Jax sees his husband re-establishing the order of his world, _their_ world, as Jax sits at the bar talking to Bobby and watches Dean talk with Bill and Grady over beers at one of the rec room tables—only then does it occur to Jax that he isn’t jealous that Dean might’ve fucked Bill.

 

He’s jealous that Dean might’ve shared things with Bill that he’s never shared with Jax.  Something about the way Dean looks at Bill when he’s talking, defers to him sometimes, says that this is a man Dean trusts, a man who must’ve done something to earn that trust.

  
Like help put Dean back together when he rose from the dead after killing his own brother.

 

Jax sees how something like that could bring two people together.  He gets it.  And he should be grateful to the guy, but mostly he feels uncertain, like Bill has a right to a part of Dean that Jax himself has never claimed.

 

For a minute, he hesitates to join the men at the table.  Then J.C. leans over the bar and says, right in his ear, “Go sit with your husband before you embarrass us,” and Jax takes the hint.  He hasn’t heard a word Bobby’s said in the last five minutes.

  
Casting the counselor an apologetic look, Jax slides off his barstool and strolls toward the table, pausing a few feet away until there’s a lull in the conversation.  Dean looks up, eyes alight with a foreign expression, and then he smiles in the old familiar way, and Jax’s unsettled stomach swoops for an entirely different reason.

 

 _Such a girl_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t deny that he’s glad to find welcome in the seat next to Dean’s.

 

“We were talking about skinwalkers,” Dean explains, and Jax has to suppress the urge to roll his eyes and say, _Of course you were_.

 

Instead, he nods, sips the beer he brought with him, and listens.

 

Dean’s in his element here, throwing ideas around about the best way to kill a regular skinwalker and swapping suggestions about ganking what the three are calling “Superskins.”  Makes Jax think of an appetizer he used to get at this roadhouse out on 99, an association he keeps to himself.

 

He ignores the still uncomfortable feeling in his gut in favor of admiring Dean’s animation, the confidence in his assertions, the way he trades on experiences to make a point.  Grady might be Dean’s elder, and Bill might have a different kind of sway with Dean, but Dean more than holds his own. 

  
He belongs, Jax realizes, in a way that Dean never has to the Sons or this town or anything or anywhere else.

 

In moments like these, Jax hardly knows Dean, and his first instinct is to draw Dean’s attention back to Jax and their life here together, to remind Dean that his life isn’t about hunting the monster beneath your bed anymore.  But that reaction is unworthy of Jax, and he knows it and hates himself for it.

 

Instead, he listens, tries to pick up the lingo and figure out what makes this version of Dean so different—and so fucking hot.

 

‘Cause Dean trading tall tales about big bad monsters he’s killed, the stone-cold killer look he gets when he talks about what he’s done to make the world safer—that makes Jax want to shove his hand down Dean’s pants and his tongue down his throat, regardless of who’s there to see it.

He’s distracted enough by the slow burn of lust that he doesn’t realize the conversation has come around to the one monster he knows something about—the abominable snowman Dean and Tara killed four months ago.  When Jax focuses his attention, Bill is just confirming their theory that the reason God didn’t smite the creature was because it belongs there—it wasn’t a monster, at least in God’s presumably longer view.

 

Jax decides he has something to say after all and asks, “And these other things, they aren’t monsters either?”

  
Bill shrugs.  “Depends on your point of view.  Take the skinwalker.  Even to our people, it’s a monster—or rather, a person who was once human but who committed an act so terrible that his outward form came to reflect his inner self.”

 

“Like a Wendigo?” Grady asks.

 

Bill nods.

 

“Some of the creatures you’ve encountered aren’t necessarily evil in Indian lore.  The trickster your people have described—the way it messed with time and confused the convoy—he usually targets the arrogant, people who make assumptions.  Obviously, he felt you didn’t belong where you were, that you needed to be taught a lesson on humility.”

 

“Aren’t there better ways of ‘teaching us a lesson’?” Jax asks, defending Ope and the Expedition.

 

“Like the guns you keep mounted on your vehicles?”

 

Bill had seen the Expedition’s remaining gunboat parked in front of the bay, too large to be serviced inside the garage itself.

 

A tense silence follows Bill’s question.  Both Dean and Grady shift uncomfortably but say nothing.

 

Jax, on the other hand, is pissed.  “You saying we got what we deserved because we aren’t afraid to defend ourselves?”  Jax’s voice is careful, modulated, but he’s pissed.

 

Bill shakes his head but doesn’t give any ground.  “I’m saying that it is not always so simple a matter to figure out right from wrong.  And that there might be other ways of looking at the world than the way you find works best for you.”

 

Given dragons and man-eating giants, Jax has to concede that the Hopi might have a point, but Jax doesn’t like it.

 

Dean steers the conversation onto the relatively safer topic of trade, and the party breaks up a few minutes later.

 

When Dean offers to show Bill the guest quarters at the back of the clubhouse, Jax resists the urge to accompany them—barely.

 

Instead, he heads for the haven of the roof and a spliff to help him clear his head.  Or at least make it less ugly in there.

 

When Dean joins him, Jax is paging idly through his father’s book.  Dean picks up the copy of John Winchester’s journal that they keep up there, opens it and shows the entry to Jax.

 

There’s a crudely drawn stick figure with an ugly, long face, exaggerated length of limbs making it seem alien despite its humanoid shape.  On the next page is the word WENDIGO in emphatic black print, the word etched into the paper almost hard enough to pierce it.

  
Jax reads the entry through to the end, squaring what he reads with what he’d heard Dean talking about tonight.

 

When Jax looks up from the description, Dean says, “Where I come from, we just kill these fuckers.”

 

Jax appreciates Dean’s unwavering support, not that he’d expected anything less.  Most of his uneasiness dissipates in the warm feeling Dean’s words give him.

 

“But you know,” Dean goes on, “I came across a thing or two in my time Before…it wasn’t always so easy to figure out what to kill.  Take werewolves, for instance.  They’re people most of the time.  And when they’re people, they aren’t killers.  They’re just poor suckers who got bitten.  Not their fault they turn into monsters.  But it’s not like we could’ve just let ‘em run around eating people’s hearts out, either.”

 

Jax nods, sucks in some sweet smoke, holds it, passes the joint to Dean, who follows suit.

 

Jax says, “I understand where Bill’s coming from.  Hell, I sort of agree with him, I guess.  We had our chance to make this country better and we fucked it up.  Brought on the apocalypse.  Seems like maybe the Indians should get a chance to take back what’s theirs.  I’m just not sure how _we’re_ supposed to fit into all of this.”

 

“Maybe we should ask Chuck and the kid.”

 

Jax looks at Dean’s face, sees something there—he wouldn’t call it faith, exactly, Dean’s still not long on faith.  Maybe it’s that Dean is in his element.  There are monsters out there, and it’s up to him to figure out how to keep them from killing people.  To do that, they have to use what they’ve got.

 

“Alright,” Jax agrees.  “First thing tomorrow morning.  Right now, I’ve got another job for you.”

 

The way he slides down in his chair and spreads his thighs takes away any confusion Dean might’ve been suffering over what Jax intends.

 

Dean snorts and shakes his head.  “No way.  I’m sick of picking roofing cinders out of my knees, and the last time you fucked me up here, you stripped half the skin off of my back with brushburn.  We have a perfectly good bed at home.”

 

“Man, you are one whiny bitch.”

 

Dean flips him off as he gets up and heads for the ladder at a brisk clip.

 

“I’m a whiny bitch with lube in the nightstand drawer and five bucks that says you can’t beat me to it.”

 

As it turns out, while the Impala is faster, Jax’s Harley is better on the curves.

“You cheated!” Dean exclaims, stalking into their bedroom, expression thunderous.

 

Jax is lying on the bed, still fully clothed but holding the lube aloft like a processional torch.  Given the way Dean’s face twists sourly, Jax suspects he’s wearing an especially obnoxious expression. 

 

“Sidewalks are off limits!” Dean insists, waving his hands in indignation.  “You could’ve hit a kid!”

 

“Yeah, yeah.  Or a puppy or a granny or that hot chick that moved in on LaRosa last week.”

 

Dean flips him off and Jax observes, “You’re a sore loser,” as he makes a show of tossing the lube well away from the bed.  “Or you’re going to be.”

 

“You wish,” Dean answers, rolling his eyes and dropping his overshirt onto the chair next to the dresser.  What follows is a slow stripping of his layers, not a tease—Dean doesn’t tease when he means to come through, and it’s obvious from his half-hard state as he slides carefully out of his jeans that he definitely isn’t teasing—it’s an unveiling.

 

Jax never tires of watching Dean’s skin emerge from beneath his clothing.

 

When he’d come in before Dean, he’d turned on the little lamp on the bedside table and thrown a blue bandanna over it, casting the room in a strange, aquatic glow that paints Dean in shadows and limns his scars in silver.

 

Jax loves and hates Dean’s scars—hates them for the pain they represent, all the suffering Dean has survived to be the man he is; and loves them for the very same reason—they define what Dean has given up, what’s been taken from him and what he’s offered freely.  They’re a map only Jax can read, and they lead to the heart beating strong beneath the worst of the scars, the mounded tissue where Dean had been fused with his brother in a struggle to destroy the Devil.

 

Jax takes it all in, tracing every scar, remembering what made it, how Dean had earned it, how he’d lived through it.

 

His hand almost shakes when he reaches up to his now naked husband and beckons him to come to him.

 

Dean kneels between Jax’s feet, crawls up the bed until he’s resting on his heels between Jax’s knees.  He doesn’t take his eyes from Jax as he undoes Jax’s button and zipper, doesn’t hesitate to start yanking the denim down in rough jerks that startle needy sounds out of Jax.

 

He’s already hard when Dean slides the jeans off of his legs, a fact Dean can easily discern because Jax still hasn’t managed to do the laundry.

 

When he leans up on his elbows to take his tee-shirt off, Dean says, “Leave it,” in a low, rough voice, and Jax wonders what the game is for a minute, until Dean slides both hands up the plane of his belly, forcing him back onto the bed with the almost suffocating pressure of his hands.

 

By the time Dean slides his palms over Jax’s nipples, Jax is ready for whatever Dean wants.  It’s only been a few days, but it feels like months, like years.  When he’s stripped Jax’s shirt away, Dean’s callused fingertips trace Jax’s collarbone, his throat, jaw, the outer whorl of his ear.  He threads his hand through the hair at Jax’s temple, threads it through and holds on until he can feel the pressure against his scalp, just this side of pain.

 

Jax moans, thrusts his hips upward in short, sharp jerks, the only motion he can make with Dean still kneeling there between his legs.

 

He sees Dean’s deliberation, sees the care he takes to keep his belly from brushing Jax’s straining cock.

 

Dean’s touch is hot, but everywhere he skims Jax’s skin, a wake of ice follows, a core-deep shiver that has him shaking, wracked by need more powerful than he can ever remember feeling.

 

“Dean?” he asks, and even to his own ears, he sounds young and uncertain.

  
But Dean just shakes his head and slides a hand down Jax’s flat belly, down and down until the side of his hand brushes the sparse curls at Jax’s cock.

 

He rests his hand there as if he’s holding Jax down, though Jax isn’t moving now at all, not even breathing, everything in him urging Dean to touch him, to jack him off hard and fast or bend in half to suck him into that wet, red mouth.

 

But Dean does nothing, just pauses there, one hand splayed across Jax’s throat, the other on his belly.

 

Jax doesn’t know what Dean’s waiting for, but he can’t help the words that break from him then, a string of begging curses intermingled with Dean’s name, “Fuck, Dean, goddamn  it fuck me, please, please, just fucking touch me you cocksucking motherfucker.  Christ, Dean, Jesus, touch me, suck me, do something, please.”

 

Dean makes a sound, something between a groan and a curse, and leans down to eat Jax’s words from his mouth.  The kiss is violent, enough to draw blood, and Jax starts back against the pillow at the nick of Dean’s devouring teeth.  But Dean isn’t letting him go.  He deepens the kiss, thrusting his tongue hard against Jax’s, running the tip against the roof of his mouth, refusing to release him for breath or begging.

 

Jax doesn’t care that he’s starting to see black spots across his vision because Dean has finally moved his hand, wrapping it around the base of Jax’s cock and tugging upward in a wicked, uneven rhythm that has Jax stuttering out broken curses and clutching Dean’s shoulders desperately.  He can’t move enough to set the pace he wants, can’t speak for Dean’s plundering tongue, can’t do anything but let Dean drive.

 

He can’t quite get there with the way Dean keeps easing off the pressure, keeps changing the angle of the upward stroke, the way he squeezes at the base as if trying to keep Jax together, and by the time Dean releases his mouth, he’s gasping incoherent fragments that might be prayers or might be the Constitution for all the sense it makes.

 

Jax doesn’t care, though, since Dean has stopped kissing Jax so that he can slide backward on his knees, still holding Jax at the throat, pinning him, and suck Jax’s cock into his mouth with obscene, wet suckling sounds that completely undo him.  Dean’s barely got Jax snug against the back of his throat when Jax is shouting and coming, heart thundering, eyesight blurring, black streaks like inverse lightning racing across his eyelids.

 

The roaring in his ears muffles all other sounds, and he’s so far gone in the power of his orgasm that he doesn’t at first notice that Dean hasn’t swallowed and is sliding even further down the bed, kneeling on the floor now, pulling Jax’s legs apart and up, and using that mouth to…

 

“Holy fuck!” Jax shouts hoarsely, feeling the probing tongue, the slickness of his own spending sliding down his ass crack, and then fingers, one, two, three, in quick succession, Jax still blissed out enough, still far gone enough not to care that it’s going to be a little tight.

 

Dean stands up, pulls Jax to him, and grunts as he slides into him, the breaching slow of necessity because there isn’t enough spooge to work as lubricant, until Dean is seated, shaking and swearing and utterly still, waiting, Jax realizes, for him to say it’s okay, he’s okay, to go ahead.

  
“Fuck me,” Jax whispers, giving himself over to the uncomfortable sensation of fullness, letting the pain ride him as Dean fights his way back in for a second, deeper thrust, and at last relaxing as Dean says, “God, fuck, Jax, you’re so fucking tight,” and comes with a groan that Jax can feel in every part of him.

 

Dean stands there panting, head down, sweat-damp hands holding the backs of Jax’s knees, gathering himself for long moments until he slides out.  Jax hisses, closes his eyes, head back against the pillow.  That’s going to hurt tomorrow. 

 

Of course, it’s worth it.

 

Eventually, Dean offers Jax a hand up and they stagger to the bathroom, where Jax sees the imprint of Dean’s hand at the base of his throat, not a bruise, exactly, just a red, hand-shaped mark that will probably fade in a few minutes.  He stares at it, tracing the edges with a shaking finger, wishing with a sharp and painful clarity that the mark could stay forever.

 

He watches Dean watch him in the mirror, watches Dean see the moment Jax recognizes the handprint on Jax, like the one Dean wears that was put there by an angel. 

 

“Saving me from something?” Jax asks in a whisper, almost afraid of the answer.

 

“Yourself,” Dean answers, shrugging like it’s no big deal.  “You think too much,” he continues.  “I’m not as hard to figure out as you seem to think.  Pretty much what you see is what you get.”  He makes a gesture meant to encompass every scar in the mirror they’re sharing.

 

Since it’s so close to what Jax had been thinking at the start of their festivities, he can’t help the goofy, stupid smile that splits his face then.  Dean gets it, gets _him_. 

 

“I love you,” Jax says, meeting Dean’s eyes in the mirror.

 

“I know.  Me, too.” Dean manages, and then he turns away from their joint image to take Jax in his arms and explain his feelings silently but no less effectively for all that he doesn’t use the words themselves.

 

*****

 

_Women with beaks of eagles_

_Breath like sulfur_

_Bat’s wings and scaly breasts._

_Women who mean business_

_Who take no prisoners_

_Who eat man-flesh._

_Proud women,_

_Ancient_

_Power_

_Women._

\--from _Women of the Sunset Lodge_ (1973), by July Straight-Hair.

 

Sam knocks on their front door at nine that morning, saving them the trip to the Home.

  
“I’m back at the Hostel,” he says, dismissing whatever worries they may have had about his recovery.  “Hoped I could work on the ’88 today?  I’ve lost a lot of time.”

 

Sam knows he can’t work on the car without Dean, not because the kid isn’t capable of doing the work alone—he’s become a pretty damned fine mechanic over the last few months—but because when it comes to being under or inside of a big, old car, Dean believes in the buddy system all the way.

 

“Sure,” Dean says easily, masking the way relief has turned his bones to water.  “I’ve gotta run to St. Thomas first, though.  Noon?” 

 

“You buying lunch?” Sam asks, and the last of Dean’s concern melts away.  At fifteen, the kid eats like a horse.  If it doesn’t interfere with his diet, it must not be all that serious.

 

“I’ll ask J.C. to make us something special.”

 

Among the last of the original sweetbutts to survive from Before,  and the only one still unattached to a Son, J.C.’s not only the sexiest den mother Dean’s ever seen, but she’s got a real soft spot for him and his little family.  Not that he’d ever take advantage of that.  Still, if it makes her happy to feed them, who is he to deprive her of the opportunity?

 

Sam is halfway down the block when Jax climbs somewhat gingerly into the passenger seat of the Impala. 

 

“Some reason you’re not riding today?” Dean asks, voice full of smug knowing.  They typically take separate vehicles so they can be independent when the need arises.

 

“Shut up,” Jax answers, but the terse words are softened by his sated grin.

 

“You coming with me to see Chuck?”  It’s not an idle question.  Jax and the ex-prophet don’t always see eye to eye. 

 

“Yeah,” Jax says, though he’s clearly uneasy.  Dean can’t blame him.  No one spends time willingly in the locked ward if he doesn’t have to.

 

They check in with Tara, who’s on the second floor doing her rounds of the stable patients, the ones likely to get out alive.  She asks about Dean’s trip and catches him up on the one case that’s come in in his absence, a sixteen-year-old girl whose appendix burst.

 

“You need me?” he asks.

  
Tara considers the chart in her hand and then shakes her head slowly.  “Not yet.  It’s serious, but she’s stable, shows no sign of infection.  I’ll let you know if something changes for the worse, but I’m cautiously optimistic.”

 

Chuck doesn’t get the same prognosis.

 

Before she says a word, Tara’s solemn expression betrays the ex-prophet’s condition.  “He’s not unconscious, but he’s largely unresponsive to stimuli.  Doctor Shakti,” the clinical psychologist who’d arrived in Charming two months ago on exchange from Salina, “has tried a number of tests, but she hasn’t been able to determine what’s wrong with him.”

 

Tara’s tone at the tail end, doubtful and noncommittal, has nothing to do with Shakti’s credentials—sterling, by all accounts—but with the fact that she herself had killed a heretofore mythical creature with her own two hands, so her grasp of what could actually be wrong with Chuck is broader than her medical training would ordinarily allow.

 

Dean can tell she’s struggling to maintain a professional demeanor, so he throws her a bone.

 

“God Radio kind of screwed him up before,” Dean offers.

 

“You think he’s channeling God?”  Tara’s skepticism is just shy of insulting.

 

“From what I understand, that’s not exactly how it works,” Dean starts.  “And anyway, it’s not strictly God-god, you know?”

 

An elegantly shaped eyebrow does her asking for her.

 

Dean shrugs.  “Apparently, there’s a whole other end times to worry about.  This is that, uh, deity talking.”

 

She stands there, eyes narrowed, face a study in conflict, and then shakes her head as if ridding herself of complicated thoughts.  Gesturing with the hand still holding a clipboard, Tara says, “Whatever the cause, he’s not responding to anyone or anything right now.  You can see him if you’d like to, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to heal him.  Whatever’s happened to him, it doesn’t seem treatable by ordinary—or extraordinary—means.  But we’ll keep trying.”

 

Dean knows Tara isn’t the type to give up.  Neither is he. 

 

“Thanks, Tara,” Jax says, leaning over to brush a kiss across her cheek.  She nods, gives Dean a weak smile, and moves back to her rounds.

 

A new orderly, “Dale,” according to the plastic nametag on his white scrubs, gives them the run-down on procedures:  no sharp objects, no undoing the restraints, no contact with the patient of any kind.

 

_Right._

 

Dean’s expecting rolled-back eyes and chin drool, unnatural stillness and death-pale skin, so Chuck’s zombie-like state doesn’t shock him.  As he nears the bed, he thinks he sees a flicker of something in the prophet’s half-closed eyes, but he’s sure he’s imagining it until the wreck on the bed starts babbling, first in broken, indistinct syllables, almost too low to be heard, never mind understood, and then louder and louder again the closer Dean approaches.

 

By the time Dean has come to stand at Chuck’s left hand, the man is raving, sputum frothing from between his clenched lips, wrists and ankles thrashing violently against the restraints.

 

Acting on instinct, ignoring Jax’s barked warning, Dean reaches out a hand to wrap his fingers around Chuck’s wrist.

 

As if he’s been shocked into limpness, the ex-prophet stills, only his harsh breathing breaking the silence.

 

Then Dean feels something rocket through him, an electrical pulse that makes him want to release his hold, except he’s pinned, unable to let go, unable to back away, a force driving up through him and making him open his mouth, releasing a terrible sound torn from him despite his resistance.

 

He knows as he goes under that he’s being taken by something, and he fights it with everything he has, lungs burning to bring in enough oxygen, muscles in his neck cording as he tries to bring his teeth together and keep the sounds from coming out.

 

The harder he fights, the tighter the grip grows on him, until his entire being is consumed by the struggle, his sight narrowed to a pinpoint of light, which he holds onto like a lifeline as he’s tossed by great waves of darkness made of voices too big for his skull to contain, too enormous for his mouth to let out.

 

Head roaring, Dean feels his knees give way, feels himself losing control of his body—breath fractured, heart pounding erratically, warm piss spreading across his fly, and then he’s plummeting, as if from some awful height, plummeting toward a sea of sound, knowing when he strikes the surface, he’ll be drowned forever by the voices.

 

When he comes to, he’s sprawled on the cold tile floor, head spinning, throat burning, eyes unable to gain purchase on anything solid or real.  He rolls to his side and spews a stream of black bile, heaving heavy strings of it until he thinks he might pass out again.

 

At last, his stomach quiets enough for him to push away from the pile of stinking puke, but he’s too weak to get further away than his bent elbow, on which he’s propped himself.

 

Jax is beside him, helping him to sit up and scoot away from the mess.  For a minute or two, he pants, trying not to taste the residue of crap in his throat or the uncomfortable sensation of cooling piss sticking denim to his crotch.  At its edges, his vision is still fuzzy, and even when he manages to still the swooping motion of the room, things seem indefinite, like he’s imagining even the warm support of Jax against his back.

 

“I’m okay,” he says in a voice that sounds like he’s swallowed roofing nails.  “I’m okay,” he says again, trying to pull away from Jax’s hold on him.  He’s only partially successful:  Jax helps him to his knees and then upright, but won’t let him go as he sways in place.  “What happened?” he asks, inadvertently echoing Tara’s more alarmed, identical exclamation.

They watch in ragged silence as Tara pulls back the ex-prophet’s eyelids and shines a light into them, checks the machines keeping track of his vital signs, examines closely, looking for anything that might explain his condition.

 

“He’s not responding at all,” she says, “He’s worse than before—I think he’s in a coma.”

  
She turns accusing eyes on Dean.  “What did you do?”  But even as her tone condemns him, her practiced mask of professionalism slides into place and she examines Dean, checking his pulse, shining a light in his eyes, too, peering closely into his face as though she can see right through him.

 

“How do you feel?” she asks, apparently abandoning her earlier question.

 

Dean has a splitting headache but feels okay otherwise, and he tells her so.

 

“Did you try to heal him?” Tara asks.

 

Dean shakes his head, says, “No,” and then winces at how much it hurts to talk.

  
Tsking, Tara pushes the call button for a nurse, and while Jax fills her in on what transpired, she moves Dean none too gently into a chair and gives him a glared warning to stay put.

 

When the nurse arrives, Tara rattles off a series of orders, apparently related to Chuck’s care, and then, ignoring Dean altogether, says to Jax, “Stay here.”

 

She returns minutes later with a prescription bottle, handing it to Jax.  “Make sure he takes it twice a day, with food, for five days.”  Then she shifts her attention to Dean.  “Take it,” she orders.  There is no room in her tone for argument, and Dean nods meekly and whispers, “Yes, ma’am.”

 

Then she pulls a plastic baggie from her pocket and hands it to Dean, expression softening.  “One an hour, no more.”

 

He eyes the lozenges gratefully, reaching in to take one as Tara moves to Chuck’s bedside.

 

Dale comes in with a pair of hospital blue scrub pants, and Dean is almost reduced to grateful tears.  He manages to change in the bathroom without needing to call for Jax’s help, and when he emerges, sodden jeans balled up in his left hand, Jax says, “Let’s go,” voice low, as if wanting to sneak out while Tara’s attention is elsewhere.

 

Since Dean has no desire to turn that laser-like glare back on him, he nods and lets Jax help him walk out.  His weakness is apparent by the fact that he doesn’t even grimace at the way Jax keeps a firm hand at his elbow. 

 

 _Jesus,_ but he feels like twelve miles of bad road.

 

“So, what’d I get?” Dean manages when Jax has finally eased him into the Impala’s passenger seat, offending jeans hidden safely away in the trunk.  They’re definitely going to have to do laundry now.

 

“You said a lot of what we’ve already heard from Chuck and Sam,” Jax answers as he pulls them out into the sparse midday traffic.  Around them, people are tending to their yards, walking with shopping bags, tossing balls around with kids.  Dean sees it all through a strange lens, like he’s looking at it from a detached distance.

 

His head throbs painfully, and he closes his eyes.

 

“And then it said, ‘Harmony restores balance.  Conflict brings destruction.  Walk in the old ways or die where you stand.’”

 

Dean’s got to hand it to the Indian version of the big cheese:  He/She/It isn’t nearly as cryptic as the biblical god they’re used to dealing with.

 

“So we have to play nice or it’s no good?”  Dean asks with a certain resignation, like he’d already expected it.

 

Jax’s look is unhappy.  “Can you see me trying to make the Kumbaya talk with the locals, never mind the Confederacy?”

 

Dean huffs a humorless laugh, head lolling against the seat.  He feels like his insides have been raked open, and his head is pounding his stomach into queasy waves.  He wants to offer Jax some comfort, words of wisdom, hell, a blowjob would probably be welcome, but right now he can barely keep it together.

 

The next thing he’s aware of, Jax is helping him into the house, putting him to bed with a chaste kiss against his forehead.

 

When he wakes up, the room is shrouded in dusky light.  He can hear muted voices down the hall, one higher—probably Sam—one lower, Jax.  There’s the smell of something cooking, but he can’t determine what it is.  He pauses to evaluate his condition, wondering if he’s hungry, discovering instead that his throat is on fire and his head still throbs dully, but he can handle it. 

 

He makes his way out to the kitchen to find Jax there with a beer and a copy of his father’s book, chicken scratch frantic in the margins where Jax has taken notes.  Sam is across from him polishing the letters that will be the last thing to go on the ’88 when it’s finally finished.

 

“Anything?” Dean rasps, taking the lid off a pot on the stove and sucking in a lungful of beef stew.  It’s probably Miriam’s, from the Café, and his stomach rumbles to life even as his mouth starts to water.

 

He sinks into a chair, completing their usual triangle around the kitchen table.

 

Jax shrugs.  He looks like Dean feels.

 

“I think you have to do what the voice says,” Sam offers matter-of-factly, not looking up from his task.  His tongue pokes through his teeth as he works the chrome polish methodically into the scrolling curve between the E and the L. 

 

“That your educated guess?” Dean teases.

 

Sam shrugs, still not looking at Dean.  “I had another one.”

 

Dean’s eyes dart up to Jax, who gives Dean a look.  It says, _Don’t freak out_.

“You okay?” he asks, trying to make it sound like visions that induce ear-bleeds are par for the course in this house.  Given the recent trend, maybe they are.

 

“’m fine,” Sam says, finally looking up.  “Didn’t even pass out.  Guess it’s better if I just go with it.”

 

Dean thinks about how hard he’d struggled to keep the dark flood from taking him over.  Maybe if he’d just ridden the wave?

  
_Nah._

 

“You think the voice knows what it’s talking about?”

 

Sam says, “Don’t you?”  There’s a challenge there, not obvious but definite.  Sam’s daring Dean to disagree with him.

 

The kid’s had a lot more experience with having visions, regardless of Dean’s storied history with the supernatural.

 

Besides, Dean’s been on the receiving end of this attitude before, from another Sam in another lifetime.

 

“Yeah, okay,” he concedes, giving Jax a raised eyebrow by way of asking what’s next.

 

 “I gotta let the guys know what’s happening.”  Jax’s tone is reluctant, and the hand holding the beer bottle tightens until the damp label starts to come off against his palm.

 

“Want me in on that?” Dean asks. 

 

Jax gives him a pointed once-over.

  
“I’m fine,” Dean insists, though his voice sounds like he’s been screaming in his sleep.

 

“I could use you, but I don’t think you should push it.”

 

In answer, Dean rises, ignoring the unsteadiness in his legs, and goes about dishing up a bowl of stew for himself.  “You?” he asks Jax, and Jax shakes his head, “We ate awhile ago.”

 

“You’ve been out for hours,” Sam adds, back to the work of cleaning the chrome letters.

 

“Give me five, and I’ll be good to go.”

 

In answer, Jax plunks the pill bottle down on the table.  “No alcohol,” he says, nodding at Dean’s unopened beer.

  
Sighing, Dean replaces it with a bottle of Jetts’ Old-Fashioned Root Beer.  Dan and Jenny had been expanding their business model lately.

 

The ride to the clubhouse is quiet, Dean brooding over the latest prophecy, Jax probably focused on what he’s going to say to the Sons.  He’d been right about the people of Charming having some trouble accepting the news that they’d have to expand their alliance to take in the Indian nations of the post-End world. 

But the first—and maybe the bigger—obstacle was going to be convincing his own brothers.

 

Most of the guys are at the clubhouse, with the exception of Ope.

 

“Rita said no,” Chibs observes with a waggling eyebrow.  General and knowing laughter follows his observation.

 

Bobby calls Juice in from the yard, and the latter comes with a vague smile.  The corners of his eyes are still haunted.

  
“You okay?” Dean asks. 

 

Juice shrugs noncommittally, his smile a little plastic.  Obviously, he’s freaked.  Just as obviously, he doesn’t want to talk about it.  Dean lets it go, and they take their places around the table in Church.

 

Jax calls them to order, lays it all out:  where the “monsters” have come from, what the “prophets” have told them.  He turns the meeting over to Dean for his report on the Indian Council.  Dean keeps it short:  monsters, end time prophecies, certain doom, et cetera.  Not like they haven’t all been here before.

 

“You believe this shit?” Predictably, it’s Piney who’s the most skeptical.

 

“I do,” Dean says, deceptively mild.  The roughness of his voice hides his irritation, but he’s a little pissed.  He expected some resistance, but the disrespect is getting old.

 

Piney snorts and mutters something under his breath.  Dean doesn’t hear it, but he can tell by Chibs’ uncomfortable expression that Piney’s being an asshole.

  
“Which part is so hard to believe?” Dean asks.  “The part about monsters that half the people here have seen?  Or the part about the Reclamation?  I might’ve been the only one who heard the kid, but Wendy and a half-dozen hospital staff heard Chuck.  Not to mention Jax heard me this afternoon when I went Indian free radio.”

 

Jax nods his confirmation. 

 

Bobby says, “Tig was the real deal, and we heard him often enough.  And after the shit we’ve put down just on milk runs, how can you still be skeptical?”

 

Piney says, “No one’s saying the prophecies aren’t real.  But who says we have to buy into this ‘peace and harmony’ bullshit?  We fought our asses off to keep this world together.  And now we’re just supposed to turn it over to the redskins?  I don’t think so.  We won it.  We keep it.”

 

Dean’s about to open his mouth and say something monumentally unhelpful when Juice says, “You weren’t there.”

 

Everyone pins the kid in his seat with their looks.  He’s hesitant, flushed, worrying a scratch on the table’s surface.  He looks up eventually, though, eyes moving nervously from person to person until they fall on Dean and hold there.

 

“You didn’t see the dragons.  Or the skinwalker.  Or those fucking…things…that flipped the Escalade like it was a fucking Tonka truck.  You didn’t see the giant rip Wood apart and eat him while he was still screaming.  You think what we’ve already seen is bad?  You haven’t seen shit, Piney.  I’m sorry, but whatever those things are, whoever controls them…we’re fucked if we don’t do something.”

 

“What says we have to do anything?” Reno asks then, surprising Dean.  Reno’s naturally easy-going.  One of the newest patches, he doesn’t usually talk in Church except to back the majority opinion.  But he was on the Expedition.  He saw everything Juice had.  His words have weight.  “Why is it our job?  We’re safe here, right?  We’ve got God to protect us.  Let someone else sort out this Indian shit.  Why should we do anything about it?”

 

Dean had always liked Reno, so he’s a little disappointed to hear him talking like a pussy.

 

“Besides the fact that we’ve made an alliance with all these other city-states?  And promised our military support in case of crisis?  Or maybe because we _did_ work so hard to win what we’ve got, and letting some monsters take it from us when there’s any other way would be a stupid, pussy move?”  Jax’s words are succinct, his tone just this side of offensive.

 

Reno flushes, opens his mouth, when Piney says, “So we call on our allies and we go to war against these things.  Hell, if Tara can kill one of ‘em, I don’t see why an army of us can’t clean up the rest.”

 

“You aren’t listening,” Dean interrupts as Juice starts to argue once again for what they saw out there.  “These monsters aren’t going to go away.  That one Tara offed?  God didn’t stop it from getting into Charming, so there’s no reason to think we’re safe even here.  Besides, you ask me, this is bigger than the usual boogety-boogety.  I’ve seen a lot of supernatural shit in my day, and I’m telling you, it’s never a good thing when the monsters unionize.”

 

Chibs is the next to speak, and though his tone is respectful, his point is still unsettling.  “How do we know the Indians aren’t lying to us?  Maybe they want what we’ve got and figure now’s the time to take it.  Maybe they’re the ones…summoning…these monsters or something.”

 

“No.”  Dean’s tone brooks no argument, but Piney isn’t cowed.  “No way.  They didn’t make up the prophecies we heard from Chuck and Sam.”

  
“You’re a little biased, don’t you think?”

 

“How’s that?” Dean asks, leveling a steady look on the old man.

 

“Well, Sam and Chuck are both your people.  And you’re pretty cozy with that big buck, ain’t you?” 

 

“Now wait just a goddamn minute—.” Jax starts, rising half from his chair like he’s going to vault the table and throttle the last of the Redwood Originals.

 

“No, Jax, that’s fine—,” Dean starts, even as Chibs says, “He’s got a point.”

 

Dean and Jax both turn to look at Chibs, Jax looking betrayed, Dean feeling anger send spikes of adrenaline through him, easing his headache.  He’s usually got more patience than this, has learned to bite his tongue and sit on his hands in Church.  He’s not an actual Son; this isn’t his house. 

 

But he’s exhausted, strung out, and maybe the pills he took are loosening his typical control.

 

Whatever the case, Dean can feel himself slipping into a cold, calm place in his head, the place he goes to kill things, where nothing matters but what he’s aiming at and no one had better get in his way.

 

Jax is still trying to reason with the crew.  Dean can tell by his tone of voice and the tension in his shoulders that he’s hanging on to his own control by the barest thread.

 

“Dean spent eight months on the Hopi res.  He’s got friends there.  May be he isn’t the clearest head at the table on this issue,” Chibs continues.

 

“Yeah, and he’s spent four years in Charming, most of that time at this table with us.  You sayin’ that doesn’t count for anything, Chibs?”

 

“No one’s questioning Dean’s loyalty,” Bobby says, ever the consiglieri.

 

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Jax starts, but Dean cuts him off with a hand on his arm.  They rarely touch in the clubhouse, never in Church.  It’s not that they’re worried about making people uncomfortable with their relationship.  It’s that Dean never wants to appear like he’s asserting undue influence over the President of Samcro and King of the Fucking World.

 

Now, though, he leaves his hand there as if to make a point about where he spends his nights, what his hands do with Jax’s body.

 

He meets the eyes of the detractors and doubters, ranges the table one by one, and then pins Piney with a steady look, an unpleasant smile curling one edge of his lips.

 

“Maybe I’m not one of the Club,” he says.  “And maybe some of you have no real reason to trust me.  Never mind that I killed the devil, who was wearing my brother at the time.  Never mind that when I died and rose from the dead, the Hopi—including that ‘big buck,’ whose name is _Bill_ —took care of me when I could barely stand, let alone take a piss on my own or raise my head far enough to drink a fucking glass of water.  Never mind that I’ve proven myself time and again to this Club and to Charming.  Never mind that I can heal with the power of my mind and that I spend my nights fucking your President and King. 

 

Take all of that off the table for one goddamned minute and think about this:  I’m the only one at this table who knows how to kill a skinwalker or a wendigo or a harpy or any of the other shit that the Expedition saw out there in what’s left of America.  You don’t believe me that these things are dangerous, hard enough to kill one at a time, forget in large numbers or in a fucking army?  Ask Grady.  You don’t believe Grady?  Go fuck yourselves.  I spent my whole fucking life killing fucking evil, and I’m telling you that if there’s any other fucking way for us to get fucking free of these monsters without mounting a fucking suicide army, we should fucking do it. 

 

You don’t want my advice, fine.  But don’t come crying to me like fucking pussies when those monsters kick your collective asses.  You don’t buy in with me now, I’m done with trying.  You’re too fucking stupid to save.”

 

He hadn’t intended to make it a choice:  His way or the highway.  Hadn’t meant to put Jax in a position where he’d have to choose between his husband and his Club.  If he’d thought about it beyond the anger that had welled up in him, the feeling of being sick to death of the doubt and the outside-looking-in and the thousand ways the Club had of making him feel like he didn’t quite belong except for—or maybe because of—where he put his dick, Dean never would’ve said a word.

 

It’s the most he’s ever said at one time, he thinks, and maybe it is the pills making him say what he’s kept to himself all these years.  But he’s not sorry he’s said it, and he can’t take it back now anyway.

 

So he waits.

 

He waits for Jax to pull away, to say something to deflate the tension Dean had caused, to try to smooth it over and make it right. 

 

He waits for an excuse, for an apology on his behalf.  Something.

 

He’ll wait forever, apparently, because Jax only does one thing, and that is turn his wrist under Dean’s hand and slide his fingers into Dean’s own.

 

“I say we vote:  All in favor of the Sons supporting an alliance with the Council of Indian Nations?”

 

“Aye,” Juice said immediately, Chibs’ softer affirmation echoing it.  “Aye,” says Sack, giving the couple at the head of the table a weak but warm smile.

 

Piney’s “Nay” reverberated.  Reno’s quieter, “Nay,” followed.

 

Bobby says, “Yay,” clearly and with his eyes on Jax.

 

“What about Ope?”

 

Jax shrugs.  “Even if he voted ‘nay,’ the vote carries in favor of the plan.”

 

Dean can’t help but hear final judgment in the sharp rap of the President’s gavel against the tabletop, but though it’s a weak win, it’s a victory all the same, and he’ll take those wherever he can find them.

 

At the bar, where J.C. is serving shots, Dean leans into Jax, talking low so his words aren’t overheard:  “You know this was easy compared to what we’re going to have to do out there?”

 

He indicates the rest of Charming—hell, the rest of the world—with a tilt of his chin.

 

Jax shrugs, kisses Dean quick and wet right there at the bar.  “We’ll do it.”

 

“Yeah, maybe.”

 

“I’ll call a town meeting for tomorrow.  Think you can get Bill to speak?”

 

“Ask him yourself.”

 

Bill had come up the hallway from the guest room and was leaning around the far curve of the bar.  He has an expression on his face that Dean can’t quite name but that makes him feel a little strange. 

 

Jax says, “You up for some public speaking tomorrow?”

 

Bill raises his hand in the old movie Indian salute and says, “How.”

 

Jax rolls his eyes and laughs, says, “J.C., get this man whatever he’d like.”

Bill shakes his head.  “No, thanks.”

 

“You don’t touch the demon firewater?” Jax asks, pushing a little.

  
Bill laughs.  “I drank a half a bottle of your best tequila last night.  Figure I owe you a sober day.”

 

Dean laughs, slaps a hand on the bar, and says, “Barkeep, give me a beer.”

 

J.C. leans forward, lips puckered, and Dean plants a wet one on her, the smoldering look she’s giving him totally ruined by her giggles.  Still laughing, she sashays over to the cooler and makes a show of bending way down to pluck out the icy bottle.

 

“Someone’s gotta make an honest woman of you one of these days,” Dean observes, taking the bottle from her wet fingers.

 

“Why start now?” she asks, winking coyly.

 

“Get a room,” Jax mutters, but he’s smiling wide, enjoying the banter.

 

“Maybe you should,” J.C. counters, eyes switching from Dean to Jax to Bill and back through.

  
Dean’s eyes widen a little in surprise and he darts a quick look at Jax, who’s suddenly interested in a conversation Chibs and Juice are having next to the jukebox, all the way across the room where he can’t possibly hear them. 

 

Dean gives J.C. a little warning shake of the head and asks Bill how he likes Charming so far.

 

“It’s a little dry,” he deadpans. 

 

“Yeah, compared to Arizona we’re positively desert-like.”

 

As jokes go, it’s lame, but it gets them past the strange moment, and Jax is soon back in the discussion, which has turned to the much safer subject of favorite now-annihilated NFL teams.

 

*****

 

_The stars speak, but we are not listening._

_The sun and moon cry out, but we are not listening._

_The earth groans, but we are not listening._

_The waters rage and roar, but we are not listening._

_The wind screams, but we are not listening._

_The prophets prophecy, but we are not listening._

_Possessions whisper, and we hear._

\--Choctaw Powwow Chant, circa 1995

 

Jax is considering what will probably happen if he punches Max Steinburg in the face.  This is a measure of how far he’s come as a leader; once, he would’ve punched Max and then considered the consequences.

  
Now, he’s reversed the order.

 

Sometimes it sucks being King.

 

Steinburg is holding court in his usual long-winded way, rattling on in a grating, nasal voice about exclusivity and power sharing, about who should have the right to make decisions for the people of Charming.  Beside him, the usual suspects are nodding like marionettes manipulated by speed freaks.

 

There’d been a moment, early on, when Jax had clung to a growing hope that this meeting might go smoothly, without the typical drama. Bill had proven an impressive spokesman for the Council of Indian Nations.  He’d spoken succinctly but in some detail about the current state of Indian affairs in the former United States and had offered the Council’s viewpoint on the events that Bobby had already described on behalf of the Expedition, the leader of which, Ope, was still not quite up to public engagements.

 

Alas, the silence that had followed Bill’s words was not of the considering kind but rather the calm before the storm.

 

The wrangling has been going on for more than an hour now, and Jax is tiring of it. 

 

Jax can’t hit Max, but he can ignore him.  From where he’s sitting at the center of the council table on the raised dais at the front of the town hall general meeting room, Jax can see Dean if he tilts his chair back a little.  Dean’s in his usual spot, leaning against the doorjamb behind and to one side of the dais, partially obscured from the audience’s view but able to see everything.  As usual, too, there are Sons in the back, not blocking the doors but close enough to them to have control over the exits if they needed to.

 

Jax isn’t looking at his brothers.

 

As if he feels the weight of his lover’s regard, Dean turns his head to take in Jax’s not-so-subtle leer.  He returns it with interest, and there’s no doubt the interchange is witnessed—for one thing, Max Steinburg actually fumbles his phrase and starts stammering.

 

Mitch Auburn takes advantage of the flub to ask a question of Blue about perimeter security as it pertains to “these alleged dragons.”

 

Blue’s doing his best to answer without sounding scornful when Jax loses the last of his patience.  He wants to be at home fucking his husband.  This shit has to stop.

 

“Jesus, people, it’s always the same bullshit.  Give it a rest, Mitch.  This isn’t about our individual issues and it isn’t even about Charming alone.  Just like with the Confederacy, this is about the whole country.  We made some assumptions about control of what’s left, assumptions we’re finding out were a little short-sighted, and now we’re all feeling pretty uncomfortable with ourselves.  Instead of owning up to our mistake, we’re getting defensive and acting like children, trying to justify our bad behavior with worse excuses.

 

Just shut up and listen for one goddamned minute—Sorry, Reverend.  These monsters are real, and they can get in.  We can mount all the guns we want, hell electrify the freakin’ walls.  It won’t matter.  This is bigger than us.  Bigger than the Confederacy.  And we either accept that we need to share the land or we end up out in the cold on our asses being hunted by monsters.  Your choice.”

 

Pastor Jurgess clears his throat and stands, waiting until Jax has nodded acknowledgement before saying, “I don’t doubt the word of the Expedition members, nor do I think that Mr. Runs-at-Night is deliberately misleading us.  But I would not be doing my duty as a man of God and shepherd of the flock of Charming if I didn’t point out one serious error in your way of thinking, Mr. Teller.

 

There is only one God.  Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and worship no other God before him.”

 

Jax had expected this objection and is ready for it.  It helps that he’d spent some time over breakfast with Bobby, the closest thing the Club has to a pastor of their own.

 

“With all due respect, Reverend, I’ll see your lightning from the sky and raise you an abominable snowman ripping through the female population.  Where was our One True God then?  Juice here could tell you about skinwalkers and giants, too, if you want.  And how about those dragons?  Think God’s going to zap them from the sky if they decide to follow the scent of fresh meat?  They’re older than we are and were here first.  Whatever God we brought with us isn’t interested in getting in between us and them.  This isn’t a theological debate—it’s a practical one.”

 

Jax’s pronouncement is met with audible shifting and a wave of muttered protests, but no one speaks up.

 

“I think it’s only fair that we consider the possibility of other manifestations of universal power,” Melissa Weitz says.  There are a few snickers and one loud groan.  Admittedly, Jax might’ve preferred that the hippy contingent remain silent.  Still, Melissa and Joan do a lot of good for Charming, and they’ve been there from the beginning.

 

“And as Jax suggests, it’s not about what we believe or don’t believe,” Joan Weitz says, picking up where her wife had left off.  Joan is no-nonsense and brusque, and her tone brooks no argument.  “Maybe you don’t put any stock in prophecies.  Okay, fine.  But what about the evidence of our own eyes?  Meredith Evans,” Joan names the first woman to die at the hands of the abominable snowman, “was a regular at the studio.  She did tai chi and yoga and strength training.  She worked at the hospital and volunteered at the Home.  She didn’t do anything against Charming’s God or any other deity to deserve what she got.  This isn’t about what we deserve.  It’s about what we have, what we’ve taken and taken for granted.”

 

“Besides,” Biddy St. Joan, 86 and unsinkable, chimes in.  “We’ve already lived through one apocalypse.  Seems only fair that the Indians get to have theirs now.”

 

“It’s not the final End,” Bill says, surprising everyone with his deep, carrying voice.  He’s been so quiet and still that despite his size and his place at the council table, people had forgotten he was there. “Our prophecies speak of a new beginning, a great, green world that grows out of the ashes of destruction.  I believe your holy book says the same thing.”

 

Murmurs of approval sweep the crowd. Jax catches Pastor Jurgess nodding thoughtfully.

 

“We are not asking you to submit to our will or our government.  We’re not asking that you convert to our faith.  Our faiths are as various as our faces.  Many of the surviving Peoples are Christian, like many of you.  And we are not threatening you with these creatures that come out of our legends.  We no more believed they would return than you believed your devil would walk the earth or that dead men would rise from their graves.  And yet those things happened, and you did not question them.  We ask only that you let us join you in creating the world of which our prophecies and yours speak—a world that is better than the one we destroyed.  A world where we can all live in peace and plenty.”

 

As speeches go, it’s pretty damned good, and though Whit Marksey, the third Stooge, puts up a fuss, it’s clear from his slumped shoulders that he’s only doing it to save face for his minority party. 

 

When the meeting breaks up, Jax falls in beside Dean, who’s got Bill on the other side, and they go out into the mid-afternoon sunlight.  Jax feels pretty good about how things went, but he’s not fooling himself into believing it’s all going to be so easy.

 

Dean seems to be thinking the same thing, because he says to Bill, “You think the same argument’s going to work in New Mexico or North Dakota?”

 

Bill shrugs, stares at the sun as though it might give him counsel.  “Probably not.  Our Lakota brothers have a more difficult situation.  The Hopi have always been luckier.”

 

“You mean, you’ve always had mineral rights,” Dean observes wryly.

 

Jax is surprised by Dean’s observation, by his knowing tone and the way he’s looking at Bill; the whole interchange suggests intimacy, shared understanding, not just an inside joke but an abiding sense of people and place that the two men share.

 

Bill’s answering laugh is short and sharp, like the yelp of a coyote on the hills, and Jax once again wonders if Dean and he hadn’t… 

 

 _Not worth thinking about_ , he reminds himself.  _Ancient history_.

 

They drop by the Hostel to visit Sam, and Dean promises to work on the ’88 with him tomorrow, since their last session had been a no-go, seeing as Dean was unconscious and all. 

 

“Yeah, yeah,” the kid gruffs, but Jax can tell by his tone that he’s hiding his relief.  Everyone would like things to get back to what passes for normal in post-apocalypse Charming.

 

Still later, alone in the kitchen working on demolishing the pizza J.C. had dropped off with a sweet smile and a knowing wink, Dean says out of nowhere, “I didn’t fuck him.  Bill doesn’t drive stick.”

 

Jax nods, schools his expression to be okay with whatever the conversation is about to reveal.

 

“And if he did?”

 

It’s not really a fair question.  Dean had been alone and in pain, suffering agonies of the heart and the body that it still hurts Jax even to imagine.  Jax wouldn’t blame Dean for seeking comfort in Bill’s arms.  It’s just…

 

“No.  I didn’t really…  I couldn’t feel anything for a long time.  And when I could, it was mostly regret.  Loss.  Anger.”  Dean shrugs, uncomfortable with talking about his feelings.  He catches Jax’s eyes.

 

“But even if I had, it wouldn’t have changed anything between us, Jax.  You’re it.  You _know_ that.  You want proof?”

 

Dean drops to his knees suddenly, right there on the kitchen floor, and Jax chokes on a slice of pepperoni, eyes watering, breath gasping.

 

By the time he can take an even breath, Dean’s got his laughter under control and is back in his seat across the table.  “Gives new meaning to ‘takes your breath away,’” he deadpans in a manner strangely—appropriately—reminiscent of Bill.  “Not quite the reaction I was hoping for, though.”

 

“Shut up,” Jax grouses, tossing his pizza crust at Dean.

 

Dean gets up then and offers Jax a hand, waggling his eyebrow like a perverted Marx brother, and leads him into their bedroom, where they spend a satisfying hour reminding each other of why it is that inviting Bill into their bed is probably a bad idea, even leaving aside the straight-as-an-Indian-arrow thing.

 

The loving is slow and sweet, nothing like the rough possession of their last coupling, and when Dean at last opens to him, brackets his hips with strong thighs and pulls him into his body, Jax has to calculate horsepower and torque in his head to keep from coming right then.  Dean’s eyes are open, and he’s looking at Jax with the honed focus of someone unable and otherwise unwilling to look away. 

 

He doesn’t say anything, though his breathing grows erratic, until Jax’s rhythm starts to break as he loses control, hips stuttering, eyesight blurring as he feels the orgasm gather in his belly and grab hold of his spine before it pulls a wild sound out of him and he comes, sweat dripping in his eyes, breath broken over Dean’s name.

 

Then Dean makes his own noise, half a curse word choked off as he grabs Jax’s ass with one hand, holding him wet and softening inside as Dean uses his other hand to bring himself off.

 

Dean’s body spasms around him, wringing a moan out of Jax as his too-sensitive flesh is stimulated almost to the point of pain, and then he feels the hot splash on his belly and he watches Dean’s face as he comes back to himself.

 

As a rule, they don’t do tender.  Neither of them is big on cuddling, and the only endearments they ever manage are delivered with a healthy helping of sarcasm.

 

But when Jax at last slides out of Dean, he can’t stop himself from lowering himself on shaking arms to kiss Dean’s panting mouth and eat the words Dean’s whispering, taking them into himself as if that’s the only way they’ll stay with him through whatever comes next.

 

If, when Jax slumps to one side, face down and head burrowing into the pillow, he’s got one arm flung over Dean’s still-heaving chest, neither of them says a word about it, and when the inevitable post-sex lassitude overtakes them and they fall asleep, if Dean nuzzles Jax’s temple and says something low and soft into Jax’s ear, they both pretend Jax is already too far gone to hear it.

 

It’s dark when they finally leave the house and head to the clubhouse, where Jax is happy to find that all bad feelings between his brothers and Dean are apparently forgotten.

 

They hang with the crew, drinking beer and shooters, listening to the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd on the jukebox, and talking shit while Dean kicks some serious ass at pool—“You’d think these guys would’ve learned by now,” Bobby observes with a smirk as he passes.

 

Jax drinks with Bill and Chibs, Juice, still a little too quiet, joining them when he’s done working on his pride and joy.

 

“She’s looking good,” Jax notes, referring to Juice’s restored ’73 HydroGlide, which he’d been polishing out in the yard.  Juice’s smile is genuine but tired, weakening when it reaches his eyes, and Jax isn’t surprised when the kid eventually brings the conversation around to Indian monsters.

 

“So I get that we’re going to have an alliance with you guys,” Juice says with a nod in Bill’s direction.  “But if you aren’t controlling these things, how are we supposed to defend ourselves from them?  Are they just gonna recognize the treaty and fuck off or something?”  Juice’s tone is skeptical, even a little scornful, like he doesn’t believe Bill can deliver the goods.

 

But if he’s offended, Bill doesn’t show it, just takes a long swig of his beer and starts to talk about shamanic magic and spirit quests and all kinds of shit Jax wasn’t expecting.  The long and short of it is that there’s a way to keep Charming safe while the Council negotiates a general treaty with the Confederacy and figures out a way to let the various Native spirits know that they don’t want to be enemies.

 

“So are you the one who’ll be doing the mojo?” Chibs asks, using the Sons’ universal word for magical crap they don’t understand.  Jax usually hears it in relation to Dean’s healing powers.

 

“I’m not an expert,” Bill demurs, “But I can manage a thing or two.  If there’s a need, I think a few of us—maybe Horse, maybe even Dean,” he suggests, “could rig up a temporary protection.”

 

An unpleasant coldness worms its way through Jax’s gut at the mention of Dean and magic in the same sentence, but he ignores it.  Maybe it won’t even come to that.

 

 

Dean joins them a few minutes later, flushed from victory and the whiskey shots he was playing for, and he adds what he knows of witchcraft and hex bags and devil’s traps and a host of other things Jax has read about in John Winchester’s book but that Dean rarely talks about.

 

He’s reminded again what a different world Dean grew up in compared to Jax’s own.  While Dean was hunting werewolves and tracking down witches, Jax was chasing tail and finding new buyers for their guns and porn.

 

Jax is happy for more than the obvious reason to see Ope walk through the door. 

 

“You look like shit,” Jax offers by way of greeting, rising to give Ope a half-hug and slap his back—carefully. 

 

Ope flips him off and sits down at the table, orders a whiskey, and extracts a promise from the mock-disapproving J.C. that she won’t blow him in to Rita about violating doctor’s orders.

 

“I’m ever hit in the head hard enough to keep me from drinking,” Ope says, “just finish the job and put me out of my misery.”

 

He downs the shot with close-eyed bliss and raps the glass on the table to order another.

 

“Keep ‘em coming, woman,” Ope shouts, and Jax feels a knot he hadn’t known was there loosen in his belly.

 

Before things can get out of hand—and Jax has a feeling they’re brewing a hell of a party, judging from the relief and joy at Ope’s return that he sees reflected in every face in the club—he says, “I figure we’ll have Peri call our sister states tomorrow, see about setting up a meeting, the sooner the better.  Bill, you good to hang out with us for awhile, assuming they can send representatives in the next couple of weeks?”

 

Bill tips his beer in answer, and Jax adds, “And you have the authority to represent the Council in preliminary negotiations?”

 

He catches Dean’s look, as if his husband finds it both funny and hot when Jax talks all official-like.

 

Bill smirks like he knows what the two of them are thinking and says, “I can’t sign any final treaties, but I can negotiate terms and take a draft back to them for amendments.”

 

“Good enough,” Jax concludes, leaning back in his seat to call to J.C., “Keep ‘em coming, sweetheart.”

 

J.C.’s gorgeous smile widens into a laugh and she abandons all pretense of waiting on them to slide into Bill’s lap with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a wedge of lime in the other.  Soon enough, they’ve gotten bottles of their own from behind the bar.

 

As the whiskey flows, the jokes get dirtier and the stories wilder.  Mouse and Kerry appear from the parking lot, a couple of new girls in tow.  The guys on perimeter patrol, relieved by Hale’s boys, wander in. 

 

Pretty soon the clubhouse walls are fairly rattling, the crack of cueballs at the pool table drowned out by the filthy rendition of “Layla” Reno is leading by the jukebox and the laughter of two of the girls as they balance on their high, high heels on a table between Juice and Piney.

 

Ope is barely conscious, J.C. wheedling the bottle out of his hand and trying to steer him in the direction of the spare room in the back, when Dean leans over and says, “Let’s get out of here,” in a tone entirely unmistakable despite the ambient noise in the room.

 

They make it as far as the Impala, where Dean shoves Jax hard up against the side of the car, savages his mouth, and works an urgent hand down his pants, not even bothering to undo his fly.

 

Jax returns the favor, panting, “Fuck,” into Dean’s mouth and jacking him in time with Dean’s own rough tug-and-slide.  
They’re sweating and swearing and bumping thighs, arms getting in each other’s ways, and then they’re shooting together, Dean’s spunk hot on the thin skin of Jax’s wrist, Dean’s low voice wrecked and rumbling in his ear, promising all kinds of anatomically improbable things as soon as they’ve recovered.

 

“Fuck me,” Jax says, eyeing the back seat and wondering how long it’ll take Dean to get it up again.

 

“Yes, sir,” Dean answers in a tone that suggests it won’t be long at all.

 

It isn’t.

 

*****

 

_Before there were ordinary men, there were giants who walked the earth.  If you look at Celtic culture, African culture, Mesopotamian culture, you see giants depicted.  Even early man etched into stone the image of giants looming over the mammoths.  Giants aren’t legendary; they’re real.  They aren’t a metaphor for our fears and insecurities; they’re an actuality.  Just because you haven’t seen one lately doesn’t mean you won’t leave your house one morning and find yourself face to kneecap with a bigger man than you._

\--Julio Eldeberez, _In the Wake of the Death of God_ (2007)  
  


 _It’s been a quiet couple of weeks_ , Dean thinks, and then he thinks, _Way to jinx it, Dean-o_ , hearing the ghost of his father’s voice echoing through the empty garage.

 

Sam’s just left for the day, and the ’88 sits in the garage to protect the fresh coat of primer from the elements.  Dean squints out at the perfect blue sky, the lemon yellow sun, and tries to remember what it was like in Portland or Seattle or Minnetonka or Dubuque, places where the weather was changeable, where he’d wake up to grey skies and rain at least as often as brilliant blue and gold.

 

Here, it seems like it’s always sunny. 

 

There’s symbolism in there somewhere, but he’s too content to dig around for it.

 

He hears Jax at the door that leads from the garage up the steps into the kitchen, wonders if they’ll have time to fool around before they have to be at the clubhouse.  The summit is scheduled to begin tomorrow morning.  Tonight, the girls insisted on hosting a “social hour.”

 

What that might mean to the delegates of the Confederacy and the representatives of the Council of Indian Nations, Dean doesn’t know.  He knows that to the gathered Sons it means acting like they’re hammered to see what the other guys are like when they actually are.

 

It ain’t exactly Machiavelli, but it works.

 

Jax pokes his head through the door to say, “We’ve gotta hit the road in ten.”

 

Dean nods, rinses the last of the primer out of the short hair on his forearms, and privately mourns the blowjob he’d just been imagining.

 

As it is, Jax leans in the bathroom door to watch Dean finish cleaning up, watches him with a heavy, half-lidded gaze that always gets a physical reaction out of him.  Even now, when they’re facing the prospect of a long night of pre-negotiation bullshit, Dean can’t help but fixate on Jax’s weight pressing him into the bed, Jax’s breath across the back of his neck, Jax’s hands, his strong thighs, his hard cock.

 

Man, you’d think he was hard up or something.

 

Brushing past his husband to grab a clean shirt from the bedroom, Dean is stopped by Jax’s refusal to move.  They share a long, heated look, Jax swaying into Dean’s personal space and then letting himself lean in just that tiny bit more to lay a hard, close-mouthed kiss on Dean’s lips.

  
“God, I want to suck your cock,” Jax murmurs, moving away at last, and Dean lets out a shuddering breath and says, “Prick.”  Jax knows exactly what he’s doing to Dean.

 

Jax’s answering laugh is a lewd delight.

 

Dean in the Impala follows Jax on his bike, figuring he might need to run shuttle duty for the summit delegates in the car.  They’ve been put up at what used to be a Motel 6 but has since been converted into temporary quarters for new refugees who are awaiting more permanent housing assignments.

 

Miriam had graciously volunteered to provide them with a continental breakfast and clean linens and towels, and the sweetbutts had offered to play maids.  According to J.C., who had seen to the delegates’ settling in, the new representative from Flagstaff is handsy, but otherwise, things seem to be okay so far.

 

_Give it time._

 

At the clubhouse, J.C. and the girls are already circulating with trays of hors d’oeuvres and long-neck local brew.  They’re in Daisy Dukes and low-cut blouses tied up tight under their exceptional breasts, and if Dean were still interested in what they’ve got to offer, he’d be taking a couple of them back to his room instead of settling into a seat next to Madge from Salina, his favorite delegate.  Madge is in her fifties, with iron grey hair cut in a no-nonsense ring around her broad face and hard, flat green eyes that take in everything.

  
Right now, they’re staring with amused contempt at Aaron, the new guy representing Flagstaff, who’s trying to grab Mouse’s ass as she serves him a beer.

 

He gets a lap-full of foam for his trouble, and Mouse feigns upset and scurries off, to be replaced by Rita.

 

One look at Rita’s face and Aaron decides to mind his manners.  She’s gorgeous, no doubt, but the expression on her face suggests that if he so much as breathes on her, she’s going to rip his balls off and make them the main course.

 

Dean shares a laugh with Madge and they clink their beer bottles together companionably.

 

“So what’s the plan, kemosabe?” she asks. 

 

He doesn’t even try to act like he doesn’t know what she’s actually asking.

 

“Get you drunk, figure out your position going into the summit.”

  
Madge nods around a sip of beer.  “I’m for the alliance,” she says.  “There’s been some weird shit going down in the desert, reports coming in from travelers of time warps and shapeshifters.  If these Indians can do something about it, I say we let ‘em.”

 

Dean had counted on Madge’s pragmatic attitude, and he smiles and leans closer now to see if he can’t convince her to work her magic on a couple of the other delegates.

 

The evening goes well enough, though Dean gets the impression that Jax is having a harder time handling Henry from Three Rivers and Ernesto, yet another new guy from Las Cruces (the first two having been tried and found seriously wanting at the Gate).  He does his designated driver duty, taking them back to their rooms and keeping his ears open as the delegates file out of the Impala in various states of inebriation.

 

Of course, he duly reports on what he’s discovered to Jax, who rewards him in a way that’s mutually satisfying, if messy.

 

He’s grateful the next day that he doesn’t have to attend the summit.  He and Jax had decided it might be perceived as a conflict of interest, given Dean’s ties to the Hopi community and his previous experience as a hunter.  Plus, Dean is about as diplomatic as an AK-47.

 

Instead, he’s spending his time gathering whatever evidence he can find to help shore up their pro-alliance position and answer the expected protests.

 

Today that means he’s at the Charming Public Library with Grady and the librarian, Mrs. Edda Oronomo, who has always liked Dean.  It’s pretty clear that she likes Grady, too, since it’s to him she gives a short stack of books, apologizing for the slim pickings.

 

“I’m afraid there wasn’t much call for such things Before,” she explains, smiling when Grady assures her that what she has is just fine.  When she wanders away, they split the pile and get down to work.

  
There’s not a library in the world that doesn’t remind Dean of his brother, and he’s expecting the lump in his throat and the way his heart stutters through several beats at the absence.  Once, he looks up to comment on something he’s found, and he’s lost enough in his task that he forgets for a fraction of a second that it’s the old hunter beside him and not Sam.

 

Dean’s voice is admirably steady, though, when he points out his discovery, which essentially confirms both the origin of the monsters the Expedition had encountered and Bill’s explanation of what can be done to prevent further incursions of the First Ones, as the Council has taken to calling them, or the MoFos, as the Sons prefer.

 

By the time they’re done, they’ve compiled a sobering list of possible monsters they might encounter—

a disturbing catalogue of things that fly, creep, crawl, live beneath the earth and swim within its waters—

and a very short list of possible ways to protect themselves from said creatures.

 

“We’re totally screwed if the Indians don’t come through,” Grady observes mildly, flipping through the color plates in the center of a coffee table book on Native monsters of North America.

 

“They will.”

 

“And what if the Confederacy is too stupid to take their help?”  Grady’s voice suggests that he’s seen it all and done it all and doesn’t expect much of the average person.

  
Dean can relate, but his voice is firm when he answers, “Then we’ll protect Charming like we always have and let the rest of the world go to shit.”

 

Grady nods, seemingly satisfied, and he isn’t alone in that assessment.  At the clubhouse later that night, Blue and Hale say essentially the same thing.

 

Apparently, the summit hasn’t gotten off to a very smooth start.

 

“Dumb fucks,” Jax summarizes as they share a beer in their backyard by the firepit, empty of flames in the heat of a midsummer night.

 

Despite Bill’s considerable persuasive talents, Henry from Three Rivers and Jerry from Montrose are resisting any suggestion of expanding or strengthening the Confederacy by uniting with the Council of Indian Nations.

 

“And Ernesto,” Jax notes, naming the new New Mexico representative in a derisive drawl, “Can’t decide what he wants for lunch, never mind making a decision about the alliance.  He’s got no dick of his own, so he’ll swing whichever way the guy with the biggest dick votes.”

 

“So that’s good,” Dean answers, easing back in his lawn chair and staring at the stars overhead.  “’Cause everybody knows Madge’s got the biggest dick of ‘em all, and she’s voting with us.”

 

That wrings a laugh out of Jax and Dean watches out of the corner of his eye as his posture loosens and he mirrors Dean’s boneless sprawl.

 

Over the next few days, as Dean and Sam work on painting the ’88 and doing the final detail work before her big debut, Dean doesn’t see much of his husband, who drags in after dark every day looking like he’s been outrunning reapers all the way.  They fall into a routine:  Dean hands him a beer wordlessly and they head out to the firepit, where Jax sometimes talks about nothing, other times asks Dean about the day’s work with Sam.

 

Sometimes, he tries to work through what went wrong during the summit that day, coming up again and again against two points:

 

Either the delegates against Confederacy are bigots—Jerry keeps calling them Injuns or redskins, despite Bill’s clear disapproval—or they’re too conservative to desire change.  Henry is reluctant to over-reach what the modest population of Three Rivers can afford in terms of trade goods and manpower, and even Judy, who tends to be pretty reasonable, is worried that Fallon can’t handle what an alliance might mean over the long term.

 

Of course, there’s also plain stupidity.

 

In the case of Flagstaff, Aaron insists that they haven’t experienced any native monsters yet, never mind the Expedition’s thorough reports about the Tsanahale they encountered just outside of the city limits.  Aaron calls them “flying women creatures,” with a note of disbelief in his voice that is just this side of insulting, and he’s outright dismissive of the notion that there are giants or dragons.

 

Ten days into negotiations, it seems like there isn’t going to be a consensus.  On day eleven, despite a pretty spectacular session of mutual handjobs in the shower that morning, Jax leaves the house looking like he’s going to beat the shit out of someone.

 

Dean kind of hopes it’s Aaron.  The guy’s a grade-A douchebag; even J.C. hates him.

 

There’s a knock at the door that draws Dean out of a particularly detailed fantasy wherein Aaron is getting exactly what’s coming to him.  A second later, Sam’s snagging himself a glass of OJ and one of Miriam’s famous blueberry muffins.

 

“Don’t they feed you at the Hostel?” Dean grouses, though they both know he’s not serious.

 

“I’m a growing boy,” Sam says with a smirk, rinsing out his glass and demolishing the last of the muffin in two huge bites.

Dean doesn’t grace the remark with an answer.

 

In the garage, the heady combination of paint fumes and chrome polish makes them both a little giddy, but they work steadily and with little talk for an hour and then two, pausing only for a glass of water or to sponge the sweat off their faces with the filthy hems of their tee-shirts.

 

Dean’s crouching at the rear bumper working on an especially stubborn area of blistering in the chrome when he hears a weird sound and peers around the tail of the car to see Sam convulsing on the ground.

 

He’s at his side in an instant, cradling his head to keep him from pounding it against the concrete floor of the garage.  Then Sam stiffens, arches his back, and spews a stream of guttural words, some of them in English, some of them gibberish or Indian—Dean doesn’t know, and he doesn’t much care.

 

What he hears has him running for the next door neighbor’s.  He pounds on the door until Liz answers, asks, “Can you take Sam to St. Thomas?  Tell Tara he’s had another vision,” and before she can do more than stutter out an alarmed, “S-sure,” he’s pulling her out of her house and pushing her toward the garage.

  
When he’s sure she’s got things under control, he runs for the Impala, backing her out with one hand, the other already keying the secure channel code into his walkie.

 

“All points, all points,” he says, for once not feeling like a total jackwad using the language, “Be advised we’ve got a hostile approaching the Gate.  I’m on the way, ETA three minutes.”

 

He makes it in two.

 

Gracie’s up on the left tower fifty, a guy named Rex on the right.  Dean can see Blue’s truck tearing toward them maybe five blocks out and somewhere Hale’s siren is cutting through the quiet, sunny afternoon.

 

Under his feet, he feels the ground shaking, and he glances around, wondering if it’s an earthquake or the effect of a cadre of bikes coming at them from the clubhouse.

 

When the first car is peeled off the top of the Junker Bunker, he knows it’s neither of those things.

 

The screeching of brakes as Hale and Blue arrive is drowned out by Gracie and Rex opening up with the big guns.  Whatever they’re firing on is on the other side of the Bunker, and it has to be big.  As Dean watches, drawing his gun and moving toward Gracie’s tower, another car is pulled from the outside wall.

 

Overhead, the fifties pound away, apparently to no effect.

 

Hale, Blue, Horse, Bobby, Sack, Reno, and Juice array themselves against the Bunker on either side of the opening to the maze that leads out to the minefield.

 

Even as he thinks of it, Dean hears one of the mines go off with a muffled WHUMPH that echoes dully in the sudden silence of the big guns’ cease fire.

 

“Didja get it?” Blue calls out, not bothering to ask what _it_ is. 

 

“No, sir.  Goddamn thing is still coming!” Gracie answers, the last word drowned out by the screech of another vehicle toppling from the outer Bunker wall.

“It’s going to take down the whole Bunker!” Rex shouts, and then the two fifties are booming away again, and Dean and Blue are leading the others through the maze and out to where they can see what they’re up against.

 

Over the immense thunder of the guns just above them, Dean can’t hear anything, but when he turns to take in the faces of the other men, wondering if they’re seeing what he’s seeing, he’s arrested by the expression on Juice’s face:  terrified resignation, as if he’s always known it would come to this.

  
The language of Sam’s vision had been unspecific—at least, the parts that Dean could understand didn’t mention the kind of monster they’d be up against.  All he’d gotten from the message was that something big and ugly was coming for “the city of the white man’s god.”

 

Well, the giant he’s staring at is definitely both big and ugly.

 

In the movies, giants had usually been depicted as looking like oversized people in caveman clothing and wearing vicious, deeply stupid expressions.  But while this creature is more or less humanoid in shape, there’s something wrong with its features, as though a creator had attempted to make a man out of inferior materials and had gotten this instead.

 

In his career as a hunter, Dean had once seen a golem, but even that hadn’t radiated otherness the way this thing is.

 

Dean can see why Juice is freaked.

 

The giant hasn’t noticed them yet, too intent upon taking apart the Junker Bunker like it’s made of Legos and not constructed from the solid tonnage of Detroit steel.  If the fifty caliber bullets are having any effect on it, it’s not apparent from where Dean’s standing, and as he watches, it turns its enormous face toward Rex’s tower, reaches out a casual hand, and swats the gun turret out of the sky.

 

Rex doesn’t have time to jump free, and down he comes, firing reflexively, gun spitting a ragged line of metal toward the other tower until Rex’s hands slip and he lands hard, flat on his back, stunned eyes wide open to see the wreckage of the tower come down right on top of him.

 

Dean has to hand it to Gracie—she doesn’t falter, steady on the trigger as she hammers away at the creature.  Blue shouts, “Cease fire!” and only then does she stop, her anguished, “Fuck!” ringing through even the muffling effect the steady din has had on his ears.

 

Looking at the .45 in his hand, Dean laughs humorlessly and puts it away, ducking back out of the monster’s sight-line and saying, “Ideas?”

 

“RPG?” Blue suggests, and Dean shrugs his assent, “If a mine didn’t do it, I don’t think a rocket will, but it’s worth a shot. We’ll distract it until you get back.”  While Blue jogs back to the other side of the wall to order the ordnance, Dean says to Reno and Bobby, “Stay here and keep an eye on it.  Let us know if it comes towards the opening.”

 

From the looks of it, it can’t fit through the narrow, winding lane that constitutes the gateway into Charming from the outside of the Bunker.  The Bunker itself is made up of several layers of stacked cars.  At this rate of destruction, the giant will be through it in an hour, two tops.

 

They have to do something to slow it down.

As they jog back to the inside wall of the Bunker, Dean sees Jax has arrived with the rest of the Sons and most of Charming’s Army.  Blue is at his truck radioing for the RPG, which is stored in their armory on the other side of town.

 

Dean comes to a stop beside Jax.

 

“Giant?” he asks, voice grave.

 

Dean nods.

  
“What’re we doing?” he continues, deferring there and then to Dean’s greater experience.  Dean’s eyes take in the waiting men and women, the guns and trucks, and thinks about what he knows.

 

“Blue’s ordering a rocket attack, but I don’t think it’s going to work.  I think the only thing that’s going to take this monster down is the thing that’s making it active—magic.”

 

As if on cue, Bill materializes, long legs covering the ground from the back of the milling crowd. 

 

“We’ve got a giant problem,” Dean says, deadpan.  “Think you can handle it?”

 

Despite the gravity of the situation, a dirty smirk plays across Bill’s lips before he says, “Give me Horse and John Thomas and an hour to prepare the ritual.”

 

John Thomas, retired pipefitter and original Charming native, turned out to be an actual native, too, descended from coastal Salish Indians, a happy, accidental discovery the day Dean had introduced Bill to Miriam’s world-famous pie at her cafe.

 

“Do it,” Dean says, turning to Jax.  “We’ve got to distract that thing, keep it from taking apart the walls and getting into Charming.”

 

He’s mulling over the idea of using Blue’s two-ton and a couple of Hale’s reinforced cop cruisers when Juice says, “I’ll go.”

 

Dean takes in the tension around his mouth and the set of his shoulders, the way he’s got his hands clenched into fists, and asks, “With what?”

 

“I’ve got my bike.”

 

Dean wants to say, “No,” wants to tell the kid that he won’t be a party to Juice’s suicidal urges, but he stops short of refusal when he spares a glance at Jax, who’s looking not at Juice but at Dean.

 

Jax isn’t precisely empathic and Dean wasn’t the psychic in his family, but he knows exactly what Jax is trying to tell him.

 

“Okay.  But not alone.  Jax, you got a couple of other guys who are good on precision work?”  He’s thinking of the minefield and of the giant’s big fucking reach.

 

Feenie steps up from Hale’s crew and says, “I’ve got a dirtbike.  It’s fast and loud as shit.”

 

Dean nods.

“Hemi, you up for it?” Jax asks their newest prospect, a beanpole of a guy with serious acne scars and a reputation for going all night long.

 

“Sure!” he answers as if Jax had just suggested a whiskey run to Modesto.

 

Blue provides a map of the minefield and they gather around the hood of the Impala to rough out a plan.  Ten minutes later, Juice, Feenie, and Hemi negotiate the Bunker maze and burst out of it onto the road that divides the minefield.  As planned, they race to the far edge and skirt it, shouting, shooting haphazardly at the giant, and generally making themselves attractive targets, trying to draw the monster away from the Bunker.

  
“Looks like it’s working,” Jax observes from his spot next to Dean where they crouch just inside the Bunker’s exterior gate.

 

It seems like it is for a little while.  The giant turns from his focused destruction of the Bunker to track the bikes with his eyes.  He turns away from the wall and takes a few lumbering steps into the minefield, which sets off a daisy chain of them.

 

Bellowing, he staggers back into the Bunker, which sways alarmingly, and then comes toward where Jax and Dean are hiding, maybe seeing the smooth, narrow road leading through the minefield.

 

“If he gets out of the field and goes after them…” Dean says, not finishing the thought.  They don’t know how fast the thing can move, but at its size, it’s got to cover a lot of ground when it’s loping.

 

Still, the volunteers had known what they were getting themselves into.

 

But the giant doesn’t make it all the way to the road.  Instead, he turns back to the work of tearing apart the Bunker, only now he’s within a couple of dozen feet of Dean and Jax’s position.

 

“Shit, that thing is fucking huge,” Jax remarks.

 

From here, they’re practically in its shadow, and Dean has to concur.

 

Just then, the sound of a motorcycle roaring closer turns their eyes from the giant to Juice, on his gleaming machine.  Chopped out, the ’73 HydroGlide is close to twelve feet long.  Dual exhaust pipes make a thunderous roar; late afternoon sunlight glints off the polished chrome on her chassis and highlights the airbrushed reaper grinning viciously from the gas tank.

 

“What the fuck is he doing?” Jax cries, breaking cover as if he can stop Juice’s next move.

 

The kid spins just shy of the giant’s considerable reach, turns off the safety of the road, and plunges into the minefield, spewing a rooster-tail of soft soil as he comes closer and closer to the beast.

  
The giant turns with an agility and speed they hadn’t seen before, bending over and toward the speeding bike, and swipes at Juice, who ducks and brakes, drops a boot, hauls the big bike around, and shoots a stream of rocks and dirt into the monster’s face.

 

Staggering, the monster shrieks, flailing wildly, and Juice gives it some gas, fishtails, and chips the edge of a mine.

  
The ensuing explosion shoots a geyser of dirt into the enraged creature’s face, and Juice and the bike disappear behind it.

 

 

“Son of a bitch!” Dean swears, pulling his useless gun out of habit, and tears off after Jax, shouting, “Where the fuck’s that rocket?” behind him as he goes.

 

He knows Hale or Horse will pass the word along.

 

Dean’s had plenty of times in his life when he’s stared death in the face.  He’s even welcomed it on occasion, maybe more times than it’s strictly healthy to count.

 

Being crushed to death by a giant or having his spine snapped by a lucky swing isn’t in his immediate plans for the future.

 

But when he breaks through the dust-cloud and takes in the tableau—Juice on the ground and unmoving thirty feet from his crumpled bike.  Jax in show-down mode, gun blazing, mouth wide in an animal scream of rage, as the giant covers the ground between them with a malevolent gleam on its inhuman face—Dean does the only thing he can think of.

 

He prays for the lightning.

 

That is if the most heretical profanity, a stream of threats against every god he knows and a few he might be making up, counts as prayer.

 

And if by “lightning” you mean “rocket.”

 

Blue comes through in a big way, the rocket screaming in with a sonic boom and tossing the giant like a rag doll across a half acre of minefield.

 

Jax and Dean both hit the earth as the percussion of the explosion blows over trees sixty yards away.  Clumps of flung earth pummel him where he kisses the earth, hands over his head to protect it from the debris raining out of the sky.

 

He can’t hear a fucking thing, has to wipe filth from his face just to make out blurry shapes—what might be Jax, what might be Juice, what could be the giant crawling up out of the crater created by the rocket’s detonation.

 

_Fuck._

 

“Jax!” he thinks he shouts; he can’t hear himself.  “Juice!”  Hoping to the god he was just cursing that they’ll hear him, turn around, see the giant closing in on them, weaving a little and shaking its head like its ears, too, are ringing, but still making way toward them at an alarming pace.

 

“Jax!”  he screams again.

 

And Jax looks up—not so much, Dean thinks later, because he heard Dean calling to him but because he was looking for his husband, hoping Dean was okay.

 

His eyes light on Dean’s face, and he smiles, which Dean can only make out through his dirt-rimed eyes because he sees a flash of white against the earth-smeared face, and then Jax must make out Dean’s horrified expression, or maybe he feels the trembling of the ground.  Either way, Jax turns as if in slow motion, sees the giant reaching for Juice, and pushes the kid aside.

 

The giant’s hand strikes Jax instead, propelling him backward across the slender margin of safety the road provides and into the minefield on the far side.

 

Dean doesn’t remember screaming Jax’s name, doesn’t remember surging from his knees to his feet, lunging toward the minefield where Jax lays, unnaturally still, seeming to Dean through the haze and the fear to be bent at odd angles, utterly broken.

 

Hands hold him back, though he fights them, and someone tells him later that he knocked Feenie unconscious, but all he recalls of those awful, impossibly long moments, is hearing a voice in his head telling him that Jax is dead.

 

Oh, and the sound of singing.

 

It’s the singing that finally stops the giant.

 

Or rather, chanting.  In the time it had taken the giant to rip everything away from Dean, Bill, John Thomas, and Horse had come through the far gate and begun the warding song, the song that will mark Charming as a place protected by the original people who had once lived and moved and had their beings there.

 

Since Dean isn’t planning to live or move or be anymore, since he’s gone to that cold, still place where he lives when he’s killing things, Dean doesn’t notice when the barrier goes up, doesn’t give a damn that the giant finally stumbles away, keening like it’s been mortally wounded.

 

Doesn’t care that the delegates of the summit, ranged along the top of the Junker Bunker at the safest distance from the fray, have finally seen firsthand exactly what it is they’re up against.

 

He doesn’t care because he can’t, because he won’t, not ever again.

 

*****

 

_We wait in the stars for you, oh brother._

_We wait in the night sky, shining,_

_Sisters, mothers,_

_Fathers.  Sons, we wait for you, heroes,_

_to return to us._

_Come when you are ready._

_We wait._

\--Hopi funeral song

 

The delegates file into the rec room cum conference center, where the long negotiating table has been draped in black for a week, a Reaper flag taking up most of its middle.

 

Conspicuously, no one sits near the middle.

 

Dean is at the far end, in the seat that Jax typically used.  Dean’s pale and haggard, looking like every kind of death, and the delegates shoot nervous glances at him, all except for Madge, who deliberately sits in the seat at his left and gives him a warm, supportive smile.

 

It’s hopefully the last full day of negotiations; everyone’s anxious to get home and meet with their respective leaderships and prepare for the Council representatives who have agreed to travel to each state and put up the protections.

 

Once the delegates had seen exactly what could happen, even here, in the God-charmed city, protected by a King and his Sons and the gifted of God…

 

Well, Dean hadn’t had to be much of a negotiator.

 

Which is a good thing, Jax reflects, watching from the darkened hallway on the far side of the bar.

  
He’s only been out of the hospital a day, and that’s largely thanks to the man at the head of the table, who’s calling the delegates to order with a voice made rough from exhaustion and borrowed pain.  Jax watches Dean lift a shot of whiskey to his mouth and shotgun it without so much as a wince at the way it burns its way down.

 

It’s five o’clock somewhere, though it’s only eight on a sunny California summer’s morning here.

 

Jax doesn’t bother to step out into sight of the table until after the delegates have taken unanimous verbal vote to ratify the treaty creating an alliance between the Council of Indian Nations and the whole of the Confederacy.  He’d trusted Dean to bring him back from the brink of death, to ease away the worst of his agony—fifteen broken bones, a punctured lung, ruptured spleen—to touch him with magic hands and raise him up out of his hospital bed in what everyone kept calling a miracle.

 

Jax knew the only miracle was sitting right there at the table.

 

When he does emerge, down a dozen pounds and still hospital pale, he’s greeted with hearty hails and careful handshakes or back-pats.  Madge tweaks his cheek—the one not still rainbowed in bruising—and winks at him.

 

Dean rises like he’s going to step aside, and Jax waves him back into his seat.

“Looks good on you,” Jax says, borrowing a smirk from Madge.

 

“You should be in bed,” Dean observes absently, distracted by Jax’s weakness, by the fact that Jax was supposed to stay in their room for another three days, the only compromise Tara would allow when Dean wanted to take Jax home.

 

“Yeah, I should,” Jax drawls, easing down into his seat and spreading his legs suggestively.

 

“Please,” Judy says, “There are ladies present.”

 

“Where?” Jax asks, looking around with mock wonder.

 

Madge’s hoarse bark of laughter sets the table going, even Henry, who usually looks like he’s just aspirated brake fluid.

 

Naturally, they have a party to celebrate the successful conclusion of the summit.  Jax has to promise Dean that he’ll sit for the majority of the time, go easy on the drinking, go to bed early, not overtax himself.

 

And Jax agrees, not because he thinks Dean’s pretty fucking hot as a mother hen—he does, and Dean is—but because Dean himself looks like he’s the one who needs caring for, and Jax doesn’t want to give him anything to worry about.

 

Since Jax had been deep in a healing sleep when Dean had pulled Jax from the brink of death and then flatlined, Jax hadn’t witnessed Doc Maartens and Tara working frantically over his dead husband, but he doesn’t have to hear the details to imagine it.

 

When he’s got his strength back, he intends to show Dean exactly how he feels about Dean _dying_ for Jax.

 

Meantime, though, Bill is headed his way.  Jax has tucked himself into a corner behind a wide round table.  The nearest light is over the bar to his left, so he’s in shadow, forgotten, and most of the party is outside, just a few in here at the pool table or the bar.

 

Dean’s outside acting as Jax’s stand-in, circulating among the delegates and guests, making sure everyone’s having a good time.

 

Bill eases his length into a chair on Jax’s right, considerately giving Jax a clear sight-line to the door and not coincidentally keeping his own back to the wall.  Jax has observed that about Bill over the course of these negotiations—he makes a lot of choices like he’s an Old West hero.

 

Jax supposes he kind of is.

  
“Thanks again for keeping Charming safe when I couldn’t.”

 

Jax has said it a number of times, but he feels it bears repeating.  He was unconscious and bleeding internally when the mojo had taken hold, but he’s heard impressive things from Juice and the other Sons.  Hell, even Blue, the most pragmatic and prosaic of men, has admitted that Bill has a very useful skill set.

 

Bill nods solemnly, expression appropriately grave, and then it wavers, sliding into something Jax might call uncertain if he didn’t know Bill.

Apparently, he doesn’t, because Bill’s next words surprise the fuck out of him.

 

“Sari would call me an old busybody, worse than a woman,” he begins, and while Jax is still trying to wrap his mind around the image those words conjure, Bill says, “But I get the feeling there’s something about Dean you don’t know, and in this case, what you don’t know _can_ hurt you.  Or at least, you’re letting it.”

 

Jax would like to pretend that he doesn’t know what Bill is talking about, but that would be engaging in a level of denial even he’s not capable of.

 

“Go on,” he offers instead, voice carefully devoid of tells.  He takes a swig of his tepid beer to hide the slight shudder of anticipation.  He feels like he’s about to discover something life-changing.

 

“When we found Dean in the desert, he didn’t know his own name, or Sari’s, or yours.  He only said one name, over and over again.”

 

“Sam,” Jax says, barely above a whisper.

 

Bill nods.  “Yeah.  It took three days before he could say anything else, but by then the fever had set in and he was so far gone we weren’t sure he’d ever make sense again.  Sari tended him by day, and I sat by him at night.  We got old Hooch Avery in from the medicine hut to chant and pray over him.  Couldn’t lay wet cloths on him because his chest was a raw mess.  Couldn’t touch him or he’d scream, or what passed for a scream, his throat was so chewed up.”

 

Jax is trying to keep it together, trying to listen both because he needs to hear this and because he owes it to Dean.  But it’s hard to sit still and see it in his head, and superimposed on the image of Dean on fire with fever and burned flesh is the first sight he caught of Dean when he’d come out of the healing sleep a few days ago—grey as ditchwater, still as stone, chest barely rising and falling.

 

He hates that it’s always Dean’s body coming between his heart and this world.

 

“I don’t tell you this to hurt you or to betray Dean’s trust.  He’d hate for you to hear it.  I tell you this because when Dean came out of the fever at last, when the dam broke and he let go of his last hope of dying, when he knew he was going to have to climb that long, painful hill out of the valley of despair—it was you he was looking to up there at the top.  It was Sam behind him, and him moving away slow as a land tortoise, and you ahead of him like a mirage.  He didn’t think you’d forgive him, didn’t believe you’d ever want him, broken as he was and guilty besides for your mama.  But he couldn’t seem to help but hope.

 

And that’s the greatest gift God gave him.  Not his life.  Not his healing powers.  Not even that body of yours that he loves so well.

 

You.  What you represent to him—the future, life, love, a reason for going on and on no matter how hard it is, no matter how bad this world becomes.

 

You’re his only and always.”  Bill pauses, staring with unfocused eyes out over the mostly empty rec area.

 

“I just thought you should know that.”

 

And without another word, he rises, taps two fingers on the table like he’s closing a hearing or a judgment, and glides off quietly down the corridor and out the door into the night.

 

When the door closes behind Bill on a wash of raucous noise, Jax lets out a long, shaking breath, raises a hand to wipe the wetness from his face, tears he hadn’t known he was shedding, and accepts a beer from J.C., who squeezes his shoulder and leans down to kiss his damp cheek and then leaves the clubhouse herself.

 

When he looks up again at another intrusion of party noise, it’s to see a familiar silhouette walking toward him out of the dark.

 

He doesn’t know what to say to Dean, isn’t sure there’s anything he can say; maybe there aren’t any words that don’t belong to God alone, and Jax isn’t the praying kind anyway.

 

But he lets it into his face, everything he’s feeling, all the wonder and the awe at what Dean has survived, all the gratitude he feels that Dean’s in his life, all the love, desire, joy—all the chick-flick shit they usually avoid except to make fun of each other.

 

Dean must see it there, though, and know exactly what Jax isn’t saying out loud, because his step falters a few feet from the table and then he’s crouching beside Jax, one strong hand hard and hot on his knee, the other touching his face with a tenderness they rarely allow even in private.

 

“Let’s go home,” Dean breathes, and Jax nods, swallows hard, stands on shaking legs, lets Dean lead him out the back door and around to where he’s tucked the Impala away out of sight of the party.

 

They’re both too wrecked, too weak and worn down, to do much beyond strip each other naked with hands that tremble with a different kind of need and then stretch out side by side on their bed in their home in the town they love in the world they’ve saved.  They touch each other reverently and gently until their breathing eases and they’re both asleep, naked under the roof of the sky, the guardian stars watching over them, waiting for when it’s their turn at last for the heroes to come home.

 

*****

 

_There is not the white man and the red.  There is not the black man and the brown and the yellow.  There is only this:  a brotherhood of man.  And brother, we need you now._

 

\-- _Annals of an Anarchist_ (1968), Author unknown

 

Fucking the King of the World has its perks.

 

Sure, he’s constantly under scrutiny.  Yeah, he has responsibilities.  But he also gets to bend the rules for a good cause every now and then.

 

The look on Sam’s face when Dean throws the ‘88’s keys to him and calls shotgun is one of the aforementioned perks.

 

So the kid’s only fifteen and hasn’t driven more than a mile or two around the block in Sack’s old beater.

 

How much trouble can he get into between here and the clubhouse anyway?

 

Besides, the kid deserves to show off his baby.  Dean, an inveterate gearhead himself, appreciates the importance of that first ride.

 

The engine starts up with a throaty purr that proves the countless hours of rebuilding work they’d done together.  The mirrors and chrome gleam as the kid backs her smoothly out into the street and executes a tight turn toward the club.

 

When they arrive, he parks it easily, careful not to disturb the row of bikes blazing in the sunshine of a California afternoon.

 

Sam plays it cool, trying to act like he’s not jumping out of his skin with the chance to finally, finally show off the car he and Dean had restored.

 

He can’t quite hide his disappointment when they walk into the cool, dim interior of the clubhouse to find the rec room virtually empty and the door to Church closed against them.

 

“There’s a meeting?” Dean asks, trying not to sound surprised.  J.C. shrugs uncertainly and gives him a weak smile.

 

It’s been a long time since Dean’s been kept out of Church, even if he isn’t officially a Son.  He tells himself it’s nothing.  Or maybe they’re still pissed at what he said to them a month ago when they’d given him shit about the Indian thing.

 

Putting on a good face for Sam, he indicates that they should take seats at the bar, where J.C. gives Dean a beer and the kid a root beer.

 

Despite the fact that they’re playing a game of “Who’s cooler?” they both turn quickly toward the sound of the door to Church sliding open.

 

Chibs falters in the doorway, glances back in and says something too low for them to hear, and then comes out into the room, leaving the door open.

 

“Uh, Dean…”  He starts, looking decidedly uncomfortable.  “We weren’t expectin’ ya for a couple of hours, at least.  Sam,” he adds with a smile and a nod at the kid.

 

“Sam finished her up and wanted to bring her by for you to see,” Dean explains.

 

“Ah, well, that’s great.”  Chibs is not a good liar.  “Uh, since you’re here, I guess you’d better come in.”

 

Dean suppresses an uneasy feeling growing in his gut and slides off his bar stool, giving Sam a wink as he turns to follow Chibs.  But Chibs stops at the door and gestures Dean in ahead of him, and Dean enters Church with a cold, heavy feeling expanding in his chest.

 

Inside, the table is packed, except for an empty seat at Jax’s left.  On his right, Opie is standing with a Sons of Anarchy cut in his hands.  He’s got the front facing Dean, the “Man of Mayhem” patch clear over the right breast, and as Dean takes in what he’s seeing, Ope turns the cut around to show him the back—the full rockers, the grinning Reaper.

 

Without a word, Ope holds it out to Dean, who hesitates, caught unexpectedly between two powerful emotions:  disbelief, because he’d never expected to be made a Son; and uncertainty, because he’s not entirely sure even now that he can be one.

 

One look at Jax’s face, though, at the openness there—Jax is letting Dean decide, showing him that it doesn’t matter to Jax one way or the other—and Dean knows he wants it more than he’d ever have admitted to himself or anyone else.

 

Dean takes the cut and slides it on, adjusting to the weight of it and what it means to wear it, and then sits down at Jax’s left hand, where he usually sits, the devil on Jax’s shoulder, the man in his bed, the brother and Son he’s always been and will always be.

 

As the table erupts in catcalls and applause, Jax leans over and lays a big, wet kiss on Dean, and when the catcalls change to lewd suggestions, Jax raps his gavel against the table and says, “Adjourned.”

 

Of course, it’s not really the ending of anything at all.


End file.
